This story is about the broader importance of Internal-External Brand Alignment. Alignment is the state of agreement or cooperation among persons and groups, with a common cause or viewpoint.

To say it in another way, Internal-External Brand Alignment is the capability to align the culture of a commercial organization behind the promise made to customers. If your culture does not speak, walk, talk, act, engage, plan, and function in alignment with the ultimate purpose and commitment of the business, your reason for existence and your promise to your customers, then leadership needs to step up and improve alignment dramatically. They are the people who can and should initiate this necessary state of alignment.

I think this goes for the leadership of Fortune 500 companies as well as for leading politicians who are the democratically chosen CEO’s of their countries. They make choices now that will influence the future of tens of millions of their people for decades.

In January 2010, an EU report condemns “severe irregularities” in Greek accounting procedures. Greece’s budget deficit in 2009 is revised upwards to 12.7%, from 3.7%, and more than four times the maximum allowed by EU rules. The European Central Bank dismisses speculation that Greece will have to leave the EU.

Since then the global financial markets are following Europe and its main currency the euro with a hawk eye since it became clear that Greece was facing bankruptcy. Stocks went down dramatically in the next 20 months and several countries faced a debt rating cut by Standard & Poor’s and had to pay much higher interest on their bonds and other loans.

On 9 December 2011, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announces, also on behalf of Angela Merkel,  that Eurozone countries and others will press ahead with an inter-governmental treaty enshrining new budgetary rules to tackle the crisis.

The problems in Greece and other southern European countries are not resolved, and they have even become a bit worse since January 2010. But the financial markets did indeed stabilize by this moment, just on the knowledge that there was alignment among the European leaders on how to approach the crisis and a defined road for moving forward.  

Big multinational corporations are like global stock markets. If the average employee doesn’t see, feel and understand the road the company is taking, or if leadership has no vision or is unable to explain it in an understandable way, people will quickly develop that uneasy feeling a stock trader has in a bear market. Purpose and goal orientation will disappear, leading to a situation where employee engagement will dramatically drop, which in the long run will certainly hurt the ROI of the company.

Dear CEO’s of this world, be like Angela and Nicolas. It is your task to create company-wide alignment with the corporate mission, vision, core values and strategy. We call it Internal–External Brand Alignment. Take the time and make a real effort to clearly state and explain where your company is going and why.  Keep confirming this in many ways on a daily basis. This is how you earn trust and give your people the map to confidently get on a well paved, or even a bumpy road.

The bad news is you have to do this quicker than your political counterparts. The good news is that you can hire world class internal external alignment consultants to support you and your leadership team in this communications challenge. Give us a call, we know a few of them…  

An 85-year-old restaurant critic became an unlikely viral sensation recently when she wrote a glowing review of a newly opened Olive Garden in her small North Dakota town.  Foodies, celebrity chefs, and social media gurus jumped all over Marilyn Hagerty’s review, some of them even assuming or suggesting her column was intended for the Onion or other satirical site.

Within a few days of her review being published, it received more than 300,000 page views, which is huge for a news site that considers 5,000 page views to be a “big story.” 

Nobody would expect an 85-year old who didn’t even know the definition of viral (beyond that it might give her the sniffles in the winter) to make such a big splash on the internet.  Hagerty’s review proves that even a good customer experience can go viral, catapulting a brand into the spotlight.  Every customer experience has the potential to generate a tsunami of a response – whether bad or good.

Why did her column go viral? The responses on Twitter and other social spaces generally fall into one of two categories:  1) foodophiles who are stunned that a national chain restaurant could garner such favorable comments; 2) supporters who admire her sincere comments and genuine appreciation of a good experience.

Hagerty’s review described her experience at Olive Garden as “impressive” and “warm and comforting” on a cold day.  These comments point to the successful fulfillment of Olive Garden’s brand promise, which is “When you’re here, you’re family.”  Further, a statement on Olive Garden’s website says “we’re proud to serve fresh, delicious Italian food served in a comfortable, home-like setting where everyone is welcomed…”  

No matter what you think of the brand, Hagerty’s favorable review demonstrates that Olive Garden (or at least this one location in Grand Forks, North Dakota) fulfilled its brand promise to one particular customer who had the unlikely power to share her experience with thousands.

When the final bill arrived following a recent family dinner at a national chain restaurant, our server “Bob” made the plea for us to go on-line and fill out a customer survey.  He had provided decent service although not extremely notable. In his plea regarding the survey, he told us he would soon be going on vacation for a couple of weeks to visit family across the country. If he doesn’t get good survey results, he said his boss may cut his shifts when he’s back from vacation.

The customer survey is becoming very common in the world of retail and service-oriented businesses.  I’m frequently asked when making a purchase to go on-line and rate my experience.  It’s also common for the associate to request the rating they think they should receive.  Sometimes it comes with a plea like Bob’s that the associate may face a cut in shifts or possibly won’t get a raise if they don’t get top-notch results.

For many employees, it seems to be all about the survey results.  Associates probably get frequent reminders from managers that good survey results are imperative.  If that’s the case, then the focus for employees becomes the survey results themselves while the experience they’re creating for customers that supports the company’s brand promise becomes secondary or even forgotten. Are these employees being truly trained on how to deliver excellent service or a good customer experience…or are they simply being trained to ask for a specific rating from a customer?  Isn’t this the wrong message to send employees? 

If employees know how to deliver an excellent customer experience, the rest should take care of itself.  Sure, you can use surveys or mystery shops to confirm and validate. But the rubber truly meets the road if employees understand the experience your brand is aiming to create and how their role in your organization contributes to your customer promise. 

If they’re only being trained to ask for survey results, that may be the last memorable impression made on the customer.  The emotion you create for your customer might be one of pity, sympathy (“I sure hope Bob doesn’t get his shifts cut when he returns from vacation”), irritation (“Why should I give Bob 5 stars when his service only ranked 2 or 3?!”) rather than excitement over a delightful experience.

Do you want your brand to be known as the one that badgers customers to give good survey results or the one that delivers an outstanding experience every time?

Have you walked in the shoes of your workforce recently?  You might learn some interesting things about your organization by taking a trip to the front lines.

Most leaders in an organization look at their companies from the top down.  They collaborate with fellow leaders and come up with great ideas and strategies to drive the success of their brand and to fulfill their promise to customers. 

What happens to those great ideas when they’re passed down the ladder? Are they working? Are the expectations realistic? Do your teams understand why they’re being asked to do things a certain way?  Is the mission and vision clear?  Do they know how to successfully & consistently deliver your promise to customers?

When leaders take the time and exercise the patience to put themselves in their associate’s shoes, they can have an eye-opening experience. Put yourself on the front lines and take a look back up the ladder.  What do you see?  How are messages delivered?  Talk to your front-line associates.  Find out what really happens in their day as they interact with customers.  Dig in to see if they’re clear on their role and truly understand their accountabilities.

Armed with this valuable information, you can regroup with your fellow leaders and start to identify all the places in your organization where you might be misaligned.  Then you can re-shape existing programs, fine tune messages, streamline and prioritize communication, and make any other needed shifts so that you’re on the road to aligning your workforce with the promise you’re making to your customers.  

In more than 20 years of experience working with some of the world’s leading brands, our experience has shown that when leaders make that trip to the front line, they always find opportunity to increase alignment throughout their organization.  When they take an authentic look at the world through the eyes of their associates, they discover ways to simplify processes, amplify messages, reduce clutter, and improve results.  It’s all about leveraging energy.  When you’re able to increase the effectiveness of several thousand people (or more), think about the exponential results that are now possible!

What’s going on at your organization’s front lines?

Company culture is all of those things and more.  And whether you like it or not, your company culture shapes your brand.  And of course you know that the value of your brand has a huge impact on how successful you are.

Let’s start with truly defining culture. Any time a group of people comes together and shares a space, a culture develops. This could include the culture within a family, a community, a club, a country, or your company.  A culture within any of these groups includes a set of values or beliefs that guides how the group behaves, performs, and communicates.  It’s a set of unwritten rules or a code of conduct that develops as the group works together toward a common goal.

Leaders within the group can shape the culture by expressing a strong mission and vision for the group to align behind.  But this shouldn’t be confused for the culture itself.  The culture is how the group works toward fulfilling the mission and vision – including their actions and the way they communicate with each other and with people outside of the culture.

Company culture may seem like one of those low priority things.  It probably feels like company culture happens organically.  A culture develops over time.  Your company largely ignores it except when the occasional personnel issues arise.  Or maybe morale seems especially low and someone in your HR department throws a potluck to “boost company culture.”

Most companies are more interested in bigger things – like brand value, profit, and sales.  Lots of money, time, and energy are directed at defining and building your brand through marketing, advertising, product development, partnerships, etc. while the HR people are left to deal with company culture.

Culture isn’t just an HR issue.  Your culture is the foundation for bringing your brand to life.  It’s the way you express your brand to the world through your most valuable brand ambassadors  – your employees.  The culture that your employees work in shapes how they deliver your brand to the world.  And with so many channels for employees to communicate amongst themselves and with the general public, it’s important they have a strong culture to shape those interactions.

Take a look at a leader in the area of company culture:  Zappos.  In his blog, CEO Tony Hsieh wrote: “Our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff — like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers — will happen naturally on its own.”

He supported that statement with another very simple one:  “Your culture is your brand.”

So how do you build your company culture?  We’ll take a look at this in future entries, and we invite you to share your thoughts on culture within your company by leaving us a comment.

You’re a new manager of a specialty retail store, and one of your top performers quits unexpectedly.  Suddenly you have an opening to fill or you’ll be short-staffed for the upcoming big sales weekend.   Now what? Better find the first warm body who can operate the register and hope for the best.

Many retail managers are faced with this challenge on a regular basis.  Turnover can be high in retail, and you are often at the effect of your employees who suddenly decide they’d rather go work for a different store down the mall or go back to school full time.

When inexperienced managers have to make knee-jerk hiring decisions, chances are they’ll hire the wrong person who can damage your brand in the long run.  Plus, by the time you factor in all of the administrative tasks of hiring and training, you’ve invested a lot of time and money.  If they’ve hired the wrong person, they likely won’t be able to deliver the results you need either.

Depending on how many stores you have, think of the domino effect if each store hires one wrong person during a 6 month period.

The ideal solution is to create a recruiting, interviewing, and hiring program in your company that aligns with your external brand and customer promise. Such a program will help inexperienced managers become hiring experts by giving them tools and guidelines for finding and selecting the ideal people to represent your brand.

If your company doesn’t have such a program, you can help your retail managers be prepared for hiring by building a network of possible candidates before they have an opening. When they’re ready to hire, they will have a ready-made pool of prospects they can tap into.  Here’s a few tips to get them started.

1. Evaluate your existing network. Your managers may believe they have only a small network of contacts, but it’s probably bigger than they think. Their network could include employees of other stores in their mall who they’ve become acquainted with. It could include former coworkers from previous positions. If they’re students, their network could include classmates. A solid network should include not just potential candidates, but other contacts who can make referrals. Assign your managers the task of recording everyone who’s already in their networks. They’ll probably be surprised at how many people they have on their lists.
2. Schedule opportunities for networking. Whether it’s attending a community meeting, social function, or simply finding time to walk through the mall and meet fellow retailers, your managers should have time set aside on a regular basis to actively build their network.
3. Turn on the networking radar. Your managers are also customers. They shop at other retail stores, eat at restaurants and coffee shops. Have them develop their networking radar so they’re always on the lookout for a person who could be a good fit for their store. Arm them with business cards they can pass out and encourage them to capture contact information when the meet a potential prospect.

If your managers have a solid network at their fingertips, they’ll be ahead of the game whenever they have an opening to fill. As they build their networks, they can also begin qualifying their top prospects.  In a future post, we will offer tips for effective qualifying that align with your brand and help identify the right people to deliver your customer promise.

When you’re ready to create a recruiting, interviewing, and hiring program that aligns your internal culture with your external marketing promise, Kennedy Communications can help you.