5 Tips for Bringing Employees on Board with a Brand Purpose | Industry Insights | All MKC Content | ANA

5 Tips for Bringing Employees on Board with a Brand Purpose

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According to Chip Walker of the agency StrawberryFrog, brand purpose is often a preoccupation in the upper echelons of companies, but, despite that fact, it often fails to resonate with the rank and file. On an episode of the Beyond Profit, a podcast of the ANA's Center for Brand Purpose, he explained:

Purpose is failing to trickle down. People are most engaged and most clearly understand the company's purpose and believe in it at the very top of the company, among senior management and particularly among younger people, millennials in senior management. They tend to be believers and engaged and feel like the company is doing a great job. And so they've drunk the Kool-Aid, so to speak. But as you go down each level to middle management, frontline workers, and then down your staff, you get lower and lower and lower responses on clarity of even knowing what it is, feeling like the company is actually living it, and are they even communicating it to you?

Such a failure to internally communicate and resonate is likely to be fatal for the success of an organization's brand purpose. Luckily, guests on other episodes of Beyond Profit have identified numerous measures that organizations can take to avoid this unfortunate outcome, and five of them follow below.

Recognize the importance of reaching employees: "I had one client articulate something to me and I've never forgotten it. 'Our employees are the most important audience for our brand, because our brand lets our employees know what the world expects of them.'"
— Abby Hirschhorn, co-founder of and strategy leader at Human Intelligence

Leverage the tools of internal communications: "We had to ensure the buy-in of every employee. And so we created a lot of content and had a lot of forums and we really rallied managers as well because studies will tell you that employees are really getting the way they do their work day-to-day from their managers. And so we had things called "manager connects," where we trained managers and really got managers to talk about what they would do differently as a result of our new values and our new purpose. ... And after the launch, we used all of our internal communications channels, like Yammer. Our CEO does a biweekly video. We've got quarterly all-company meetings."
— Tabitha Upshaw, senior director of brand, reputation, and impact, at NI

Remember, repetition is your friend: "Your biggest job is to get bored with your purpose, with talking about your purpose, and to get over the boredom because the more people say it, the more it becomes a part of who they are, the easier they'll see how their actions are inconsistent with it, and the more ways they'll see to bring it to life."
— Brad Brinegar, founder of and principal at Cubist Martini and executive in residence at Duke University's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative

Ensure people understand how they contribute to brand purpose in their specific roles: "We really want to make sure not only that we walk the walk, but when our people tell the story of PwC, they do it from a place of firsthand knowledge. It's great if they can tell the strategy; it's better if they can show how they were a part of the strategy and what it meant to them and what they learned from it."
— J.C. Lapierre, chief communications officer and strategy leader at PwC

Integrate purpose into employee evaluations: "Every company has some form of feedback or performance reviews. Some do it in a more agile way, some do it in a more structured way — once a quarter or once every half-year, whatever it might be. Do you, in those discussions about performance and career pathing, do you talk about purpose? Before we have any numbers, you can at least start saying, 'Here is what the company's trying to be. Here's the purpose of the company. Here's how we're trying to bring it to life. What have you done this month, this week, this quarter, yourself, to bring that to life with our customers and with our employees?'"
— Jim Stengel, president and CEO at The Jim Stengel Company


The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.


Morgan Strawn is a senior manager of editorial and content development at ANA.

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