Brand Strategy: If You Get Employees on Board, Customers Are Easy

When I checked the bill, all they charged me for was the tire. No labor or anything — just the cost of the tire.

I called them back and the guy on the phone said, “You and your family are such good customers that this was on us.” 

My wife was driving home last week and had a slow flat on the interstate. She was able to creep into Meinke where we get all of our cars serviced. They promptly came out and took all her worries away. Long story short, the work was done and in a short time, she was on her way home.

Moral of the story? We’re now a confirmed customer for LIFE. 

This highlights something you should know: everyone that works in your business is a brand ambassador, from the lowest rung on the org chart to the top executive. We sometimes falsely assume that it’s only when you get higher up in the organization that branding matters. However branding has a lot more effect when it is contagious down to the street level.

The importance of touch points

How many times have we gone into retail establishments and the employees went above and beyond for you? Those encounters always tend to chisel an impression into our psyche. On the other hand, when the opposite happens and we are rudely treated as if we are bothering them, that also has an effect. Studies however, have shown that the later experience is shared amongst friends more so than the former.

Companies spend enormous amounts of time and money developing, strategizing, and implementing marketing campaigns about who they are to their target audience and anyone else who will listen.

A companies brand is not just a cute marketing statement or some logo. Regardless of what your advertising campaign is, if your employees do not embody your message, as the say in The Sopranos, “fuhgeddaboudit. “ It’s just not happening.

Yes, but do your employees get it?

Companies can ignore employees at their own peril, however, they are the best advertisement you could ever have. If they live the brand that syncs to your marketing message, you are at the intersection of nirvana.

I had an experience at a local chain here in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia the other day (where I am working as an HR leader). I bought an extension card, took it home, and it was the wrong type. So I put it back in the container and on my way home from work, I stopped by not for a refund but an exchange.

When I went to customer service, you would have thought that I was asking for double my money back. Because I had opened the package, the clerk adamantly refused to exchange it and basically walked away.

I asked for the manger and he apologized and gave me one that was already opened. My suggestion to him was that his customer service reps need a lot of training and I would not be coming back to shop there at all. So, customer lost and the story was repeated at work the next day.

Branding means starting with employees first

The customer experience is paramount, whether in a retail environment or inside a call center. If that touch point with the customer is not a branding experience, you have lost.

Each one of your employees is responsible for delivering what your brand promises. And if the employees don’t get it, their attitudes and behavioral patterns towards clients, colleagues, partners, suppliers means that the branding effort will have been in vain.

Your entire organization is constantly at risk because in this age of social media. Yes, bad news travels especially fast!

As part of your “brand strategy” you have got to get your employees to live it. An engaged workforce goes a long way in upholding that strategy. One the other hand, regardless of the campaign you devise if your employees don’t get it, it is not going to matter.

So before you go into that conference room to start talking brand, make a detour into your workforce.

That is an important first step. The process must begin by explaining to all employees the essence of the brand and what it is all about. The company must clearly define and elaborate the desirable traits and behaviors that they want their employees to exhibit. Most importantly, they should solicit feedback from those very same employees

And if that key component of your branding effort — your employees — do not know what the brand stands for, it is hardly reasonable to expect that they will be able to “live it.”

One day smart companies will spend the money getting more insight into their employees before they start the journey of getting to know their customers. They just might find that if you get the former right, the latter is a piece of cake.

Today’s Job Search: What It Takes to Get to the Top of the Pile

A job search today is not your Mother or Father’s job search

“I have some ideas as to how I am going to approach this and would like for you to take a look and give me your thoughts. My response was as usual, “talk to me first as to what you are thinking and then send me your draft [s].”

The lady I was helping methodically walked me through her thought process and how she was going to take it and transfer it to marketing collateral.

I realized after hanging up that a job search today is beyond anything that we have ever witnessed in years past. The day of just sending out a generic resume is a thing of the past. There is an entire cottage industry that has been built around resumes and LinkedIn bios.

Bringing your “book” to a job interview

I have friends that are former HR professionals who have hung their shingles out as resume writers, or shall I say, designers of resumes. Two of the industry best are Careers Done Write(Debra Wheatman) and The Resume Crusade (Chris Fields)

Dealing With a New Company Culture: Do you Compromise, or Adjust?

How are you going to deal with a new culture? Do you think the leadership style in another country will make a difference? I know that you can be very opinionated, but you may need to tone it down in another country.

Questions about workplace culture have always intrigued me. What is a successful model so that you are accepted into a new environment?

What if you are rejected? How can you get a sense up front to make the changes to increase your chance of success? What will you have to give up — and what will they have to give up?

These are all interesting questions, and they are all relevant.

Compromise or adjustment? Choose one

HR Leader Spot in the Middle East? It’s Just Another Check on My Bucket List

 I applaud you for having the gumption to make this move. Are you are really going to do that?Are you kidding me 

You aren't afraid to move to another country

Moving to the Middle East? Bon Voyage, I am so happy for you.All these comments came up over the   past month as I completed yes completed my career bucket list

I had always wanted a CHRO (chief human resources officer) role since the     day I got involved in HR. My    

other checkpoint was that I wanted to live life as an expat

PowerPoint Hell: Why Do We Put Up With 70 Slide Presentations?

 “We spent literally an hour trying to decide which whether the to use a period, capital letters, or the size of the boxes in the presentation. All this discussion went back and forth for so long that I could not believe we could waste all this time on something so trivial. But then again, all of our prep meeting are

like this. It seems more time is spent on this than the actual content.”

As my friend told me this, I could just see her stomach churning as she was regretting going into work for the prep session for yet another monstrous deck.

I had lunch with a CHRO friend of mine last week when she told me the story of a vendor presenting a 70 plus PowerPoint slide deck. By the time they were finished, everyone was just plain exhausted and worn out.

But did they get they content right? Well, yes and no.

Lots of slides. Rethink your presentation

PowerPoint has taken over corporate endeavors. You know it is a “major” meeting when someone has a deck of slides. When I see that my thought always is — what in the hell did we use before deck? We talked it through, I think.

I remember reading once about a CEO who would wait until people came in with slides, and he would say, “Just walk me through it and forget the deck.” He didn’t like the time wasted on PowerPoint decks. He just wanted them to tell the story.

I recall presenting a few weeks back and I used an age old technique. I started off by telling a story based on what we were discussing. By framing this story up front, I got instant audience connection to what we were talking about. My deck was a print out with only two (2) slides. We had a great discussion and I did not even pull that tiny deck out until near the end of the meeting.

Mission accomplished.

If you need a 70 slide PowerPoint deck to get your point across, maybe you need to rethink your presentation. Do you actually need all those pages? Not only that, but when you see this level of volume you can rest assured that the slides are busy with circle, semi-circles, multiples of everything, fade in/fade out, etc.

Have you ever driven down a highway and noticed a billboard while you are driving at 60 plus mph? With one glance, you got it. The more info that you add, the less clear your message is.

Is your deck the teleprompter

I tend to think that these large PowerPoint decks are the cousin of the teleprompter and the brother of the notecards. It makes sure that you will not forget anything. If I put everything on a slide, it keeps me on track.

I remember a politician a few years back got on stage and her notes got pulled out of order — and she was flustered. She kept asking for time to get her notes straight. She was frozen and she could not continue her speech.

It  makes me wonder: What would happen if your deck was misplaced and you had to do it solo without the aid of the slides?

However, if you concentrate on your story and what you are trying to tell, you will become a lot more confident, and that makes for a stronger connection with your audience.

Simplicity has benefits

The Harvard Business Review‘s Nancy Duarte judges PowerPoint presentations by applying the “glance test,” saying that it should take no more than three (3) seconds for viewers to intellectually process and comprehend a slide.

If it takes any longer than that, the audience is going to be reading your slides and not hearing your message.

Simplicity has its benefits. If they are going to read or glance, make it so that they can get to your point within three seconds.

Take a quick look at the slide here and you get what simplicity means. This allows you to tell your story and make the story the business case and tell a compelling story.

So next time you feel a deck beckoning you, let your story be the real story, which will be remembered a lot longer than a 70 plus slide deck.