How a Strong Internal Brand Can Help Your Company Flourish

When employees feel connected to your vision, others do too.

When you’re gearing up for a big change – a product or service launch, market expansion, or leadership transition – most executives focus on the impact it will have on their external stakeholders. How will current customers and clients react, and what marketing support is needed to engage prospects?

We love to provide creative, effective strategies that resonate with each external audience – but we often recommend taking the pulse of your internal brand first.

Here’s why: An organizational change or expansion is a critical time to tell your story, and you want to make sure you’re leading with the most compelling, attractive and truthful narrative possible.

• Your internal brand is the mission, vision, purpose and values that set your company apart and drive your actions. It’s the throughline that connects an employee’s day-to-day job with purposeful impact. And when your internal brand is strong and resonates with employees, you can be confident that it will translate powerfully to external audiences.

A great place to start is with a Brand Health Study, a comprehensive analysis of how internal and external stakeholders experience the company.

The results are deeply insightful and strategic: Highlighting your most valuable differentiators, specifying opportunities to better serve your key stakeholders, evaluating your internal engagement and culture, and informing whether the brand or its visual identity need to evolve.

• The design of each study is customized to the unique needs and goals of each organization, but it’s built on guided conversations with internal and external audiences – think board members, employees and customers or clients. It can include site visits, mystery shopping at competitors or aspirational companies and even ridealongs with sales teams, technicians and other frontline employees who represent your brand on the ground.
• The results will allow you to evaluate how employees feel about the organization – a strategic advantage in your employee engagement and retention efforts – while providing guidance for new initiatives and insight on how a company’s name and visual identity performs in the marketplace.

But what if there’s no big change on the horizon?

We still recommend intentionally evaluating your internal brand if it’s been more than a few years since you last revisited it. Every business is experiencing market pressures and industry changes, and across all sectors, employee engagement is plummeting.

In fact, employee engagement is now at a 10-year low, according to Gallup – not the headline you want to see. This translates into 8 million Americans who are less engaged with their jobs now than in 2020, the year engagement peaked.

• One piece of the puzzle: Businesses are still learning how to build a culture that bridges their divides. How do you keep hybrid and remote employees engaged and connected to the company if they rarely interact with people outside their own teams? How do you build a sense of culture and continuity across wildly different jobs, like the behind-the-scenes staff and the frontline workers who are with patients or clients all day? For many companies, it’s never been harder to rally and inspire their employees.
• Research shows that employees’ sense of involvement and enthusiasm predicts several key business outcomes – including quality, safety and profitability.

An internal brand assessment gives you a place to start by quantifying how employees feel about their workplace and culture and how connected they are to your mission, vision and purpose. When employees feel inspired by the company’s purpose and values, believe their work is making an impact and enjoy the culture, everyone else who engages with your brand will notice.

As one client of ours often says, “Happy employees mean happy customers.”