Employee Actions Speak Louder than Mission Statements
July 31, 2008 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
We’ve all experienced the rogue employee who wipes out any goodwill you felt for a restaurant or a service supplier with their attitude.
Well, corporate cultures can be just as toxic to the customer relationship, but instead of one dysfunctional “brand ambassador,” you have a company full of them.
Valeria Maltoni offers two examples of ways companies sabotage the customer relationship. On her Fast Company blog, she describes the way companies drive away customers with poorly thought-out cost cutting efforts.
On her Conversation Agent blog, she talks about measuring brand value, and how a weak or non-existent brand strategy can destroy your sales.
Put simply, if you haven’t gone through the effort of developing a strong brand and ingraining the values and brand promise in your workforce, you are setting your company up for weak performance.
What makes your organization special? What sets your products and services apart? How do you make people’s lives better?
Everyone in your company should be able to answer those questions. If not, how do you know if any of your customers will stay with you?
Baking your values and your brand into the DNA of your organization is a huge communications challenge. That’s the best kind of challenge.
Good luck!
Baking a brand internally is a big challenge. For all the reasons I outlined and because often the language of familiarity is not the same as the polished language of branding. Why that is or should be, I have no idea.
When I worked in the chemical industry, we used to have research names for compounds. We would do studies that lasted months. Then, when we were ready to launch a product, we would brand it. Guess what? By then, every employee was used to calling the compound a different name.
There should be one name, one honest/uniform representation of what the product/service is.
Ya i agreed Actions are more powerful than words to show and influence others.