How to infuse your brand message in the minds and hearts of your employees

Five Strategies to Align Your Corporate and Product Brand with Your Employer Brand

Aug 19th, 2022, by Angelina Penkova

So how do you convince your customers to buy your products and services?

You tell them what you stand for in life and in business. You solve their problems and meet their needs through your products and services. You explain how you are different from others. You give them a list of features and benefits. You communicate clearly and with passion.

You can teach your employees to communicate the same way with peers and customers and ultimately strengthen your employer brand as well as your product brand. The question is how to make this a part of your organization’s DNA.

The key is to align your employer brand with your product brand.

When you think about it, it all sounds perfectly natural. Get your employees to love your corporate brand, so they can operate at high levels of motivation while living the brand message in a congruent way within the organization itself.

However, way too often we neglect the value of teaching the core brand message to our employees, rushing to immerse them into operational matters. You can use five simple and effective strategies to align your employer brand with your product brand. Here are a few suggestions from our team at People Portal.

1. Perfect the onboarding process

There’s no better time to transfer your corporate and product brand’s attributes than the first month of an employee's journey with your company. Help your employees understand your why – the reason your company exists and the way it serves its customers.

Tell your company’s story in detail. Show photos of the team, share information about the product or service evolution. Showcase information about past awards and achievements and future plans.

Clearly explain your company values. Don’t just list them – use concrete examples of manifested behaviors that best demonstrate the values. Try putting your employees in imaginary work scenarios and challenge them to think of solutions to issues. See how they react and try to provide examples how other employees have solved similar issues through the lens of the company’s values.

2. Involve leaders

Leaders best convey the history and vision of the company. Some big companies can find it difficult to arrange meetings for all new employees with leaders as part of the induction process. Create a video message! Have new team members watch the CEO’s welcome message on the first day at your company. Polish the story! Use storytelling strategies to describe the founders of the company, how they got started and what drove them to success. Contact People Portal for assistance in creating your your corporate storyline.

Have regular Quarterly meetings or webinars where the company’s leaders share achievements and future strategies with the team. Arrange informal meetings between the company’s leaders and employees. For example, you can schedule time in your CEO’s calendar to meet a member of the team for lunch twice or three times per month. That won’t hurt his schedule but will have an enormous impact

3. Organize workshops / immersion days with your product development team

Your product or service with its features, benefits, and differentiators can best be understood if you immerse team members in the actual making. Organize joint workshops with your R&D team (or equivalent). If possible, involve your employees in the early stages of product/service design. Have them go through that process together with your product developers.

Even if your employees are not product design people, have them learn the product design fundamentals you use at your company. Teach your employees design thinking methods to help them ideate and prototype fast. You can organize team building events where product development is part of the activities.

4. Immerse the team in marketing, sales and support

Make your employees customer facing agents even if just for a day. Have the service your phone hotline or online ticket system so they can speak to customers directly and understand their challenges.

Teaching something is the best way to learn something. So, have your employees become interns at the marketing and sales departments for one week a year. They’ll understand how product benefits are communicated best and how sales negotiations work. They’ll be put in a position to communicate your brand and that’s the best way to learn it and ingrain the brand’s message in their minds.

5. Make your employees your customers – help them experience your product

This is the simplest and the most powerful strategy of all. Help your employees become customers and users of your product or service. Tailor this process according to your individual product offering. Lead your team through the buying decision making process where they compare your product to competitor offerings. They’ll be reading reviews and comments on social media and in forums. Have them go through the purchasing process. Show them product tutorials. Check back to see how they are using your product and in what ways they’ve integrated it in their life.

This process may differ across industries, as well as in B2B and B2C companies. Our team can help you refine it and implement it in practice.

Want to explore your organization's values? Want to tell your story in a powerful way?

Find out how our certified Barrett Center and CultureTalk consultants can help you align your corporate and employment brand.

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