Your brand is guaranteed to go through changes in 2020. You’re probably already working on some of those changes now. You’ll launch new products or services, new campaigns or new promotions in the new year. You might even unveil a brand makeover or acquire another company.
No matter what form that change takes, you will ask your customers to embrace new messages and new promises. While most of these are exciting (if not a little daunting) initiatives, it can be hard to manage the change and maintain the overall consistency of your brand.
Consistency, or brand alignment, starts within your company, and we are here to help. I am pleased to introduce our new field guide – Activation 2020: A Marketer’s Guide to Driving Internal Brand Alignment. This is a manual to assist marketers as they lead all their key internal audiences (sales, customer service, distributors, dealers, etc.) through a variety of brand-related initiatives.
A Preview of Activation 2020
In this guide, we provide a roadmap for engaging these critical internal audiences in ways that build belief and confidence in your brand. Belief and confidence are the building blocks to achieve consistency. The insights include:
- How much inconsistent brand messaging could be costing your company (hint, it’s a lot of money)
- Understanding the difference between knowledge and belief (and why the difference matters)
- How shaping the employee experience with your brand impacts the customer experience
- Measuring employee brand perception and how to use the data
- Ideas on fresh tactics and smart timing that will help employees adopt and carry-through the message
Making Brand Alignment a Priority
So what? Why should marketers be focused on this heading into a new year?
The answer will be different for each person, but marketers should start by asking themselves a simple question – “What will my results look like if our people are not telling a consistent story?” If your salespeople don’t just “get it” but actually “believe” it, will you achieve your goals? If your frontline teams are telling a different story than your marketing communications to customers, will you lose sales to your competitor?
We know through research that 80% of marketers believe that their front-line teams play a crucial role in helping them achieve their own goals. This is our wish for marketers in 2020. To align their stories and their goals with the storytellers they have on the front lines talking to customers. To achieve this, marketers will have to find innovative ways to bring people along for the ride as things change.
