[MUSIC] So we've talked about how branding is not just visual identity. And we've also talked about how customers have a image of the brand in their minds, and they have a different relationship with the brands. Have they heard about it? Have they tried it? Have they adopted and are they loyal to. This video is all about the reciprocal aspect of brand health when it comes to inside the organization. Is it simply sticking your logo on your company cup, or maybe branding the employees as you can see here with my I love London Business School button. It's a lot more and it's also important to recognize why internal brand health is important. So if you think about the external brand health, the brand image in the minds of the customers. What that really is is a representation of what the customers expect of the brand, maybe because you've promised it, and maybe because they've experienced it. But for whatever reason, it's the image they have of the brand, and that's with what they approach you. So if you think about what the customer satisfaction is or the delight they might experience, or maybe the disappointment, it's really that relationship between what you expect and what you experience. That's the outcome that the customers will have. So if your experiences is above your expectations, you're delighted, maybe even surprised. If they meet your expectations you're satisfied as a customer, and if you fall short, well that's when customers are not happy. And we also talked about how expectations really are around the customer journey, all those moments that matter, and that people stand behind those moments. Now if you just continue that logic, you have to think about who actually delivers on that promise, it's your people. Either directly through their behavior, or indirectly through the products and services that we design, and we provide. So now you need to ask yourself the questions well what if my people don't know what my brand stands for. What if they don't believe in it, what if it doesn't motivate them, and critically what if they don't know what to do in order to actually live the brand, to deliver it, and to deliver against my customer's expectations. Well, then you're going to fall short in the delivery of your strategy. And in many ways, because they are precursor, they come first, you can think about the internal brand health as a leading indicator of brand health and when you look at your customers, it's really about looking backwards, in terms of how well have I performed in the past. Now you can look at that trend, but it is still backward looking, whereas the people, they often come first. And therefore, the internal brand health is extremely important for the organization to understand. Now, the content is slightly different. If you recall from the traditional brand health aspect, one of the ways to think about was that inverted sales funnel and you know, you went from awareness to trial to bonding, it kind of Went smaller and smaller as he went through that journey. It's slightly different on the internal side and there's really three aspects to that equation. One, is the brand image. The other one is the identification, do I identify with the brand, personally? And the third is really the integration, is the brand integrated in my behavior and into the culture of the organization, the rewards and recognition if you will. And as you will know by now, I like to use, multiples of the same letter. We can call this framework the six A's of internal brand health. And they add up obviously to some kind of a measurement system where you can kind of get a heat map of the organization. You know where in the organization things are kind of red, meaning not so good, versus orange or yellow versus green, where the brand really is lived and it delivers for the customers. So you can assess your organization and you can look at the pockets of where the brand is delivering and where it's not delivering. And then you can engage in requisite action as a result. So the six As are as follows. The first one is attention, yhe second one is awareness, the third one is acceptance, the forth is advocacy, the fifth and maybe the most critically is action and the sixth of the A's is adherence. And let me give you a sense of what this are and how we might think about measuring them. I have my own self instrument but I think it's pretty common sense. So let's start with the first one, which is the attention to the brand. And you might recall that early on, and the logo for this MOOC is this coat hanger. We have operations using this coat hanger, which really delivers not towards the brand promise, it might actually undermine the brand promise. If you're promising your customers a comfortable stay, you cannot have these kind of coat hangers. Yes, they might save some money because some of your customers are naught and steal them, but it's actually not delivering. And you might ask yourself the question, why is that? Well maybe the brand and what it stands for, and as a result your strategy Is not understood by the different pockets in the organization. So in this case, operations, they have different KPIs, they're not paying attention to the brand, they probably don't even realize what they're doing in terms of your brand. So that first aspect of internal brand-held attention is do people understand the importance of their brand? Do they think branding is important? And very often we fall short on this dimension. Sadly, not just in small pockets of the organization but even at the board level. Do our senior managers believe in the importance of brand? If they believe that branding is fluff then we have our work cut out for ourselves. We have to make a business case for the brand in order to fix that shortcoming. Now the second step is the awareness of the brand. There is some research going back to Kaplan and Norton when they wrote about score cards, which basically shows that most employees do not understand their company's strategy. Most employees also don't understand the company's brand. We talked about, in one of the early videos you will have seen the CO of Of M&C Saachi, David Kershaw, and their tagline is Brutal Simplicity of Thought. It was all about can we boil down the brand promise not to six, seven, eight different aspects, but maybe one or two. Now, traditionally we think this is important for customers to understand how are we differentiated on what attributes. But it's equally important internal to the organization. Because if our own employees, our own people cannot understand what the brand is for, it's going to be very, very difficult to act on it in the first place. And there's a wonderful quote from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and this is about the Cheshire-puss, that disappearing cat in the tree, and Alice asks him, Cheshire-puss, would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, says the cat. And Alice says, well, I don't much care where. Well, then it doesn't matter which way you go. So if our employees, they're not trying to bring down the company, they have probably good intentions, but unless they know which direction they're heading, they're going to go any of the sensible directions. So if we go back to an example I brought up early, which is Disney, if they don't understand that Disney promises to have a magical experience, well, maybe they just want to provide a bit of fun. Maybe bit of excitement, maybe bit of escapism, but that will not add up to a magical experience at the end of the day. So the awareness obviously comes first, and you'll see that across your organization, people have a quite a different sense of what the brand is about. Now the third dimension is acceptance, and this is really when it gets to the personal level. This is the first of the two identity aspects of the brand. The first two were the attention and awareness of the brand image. The next is really about the identification. Now do I personally believe in this brand promise. I might understand it, but it doesn't mean I believe in it, I identify with it, I accept it as being the right thing. I might have other ideas for the brand. So you could actually segment your population, and I've seen this happen very often in work shops where you've got some people are sitting there like this, they're rolling their eyes when the word brand comes up in the strategy. Sadly, they can often be opinion leaders because they have a strong opinion. They can be quite useful because they bring out the issues and there's sort of three sets of people here. Some of them are what you could call the antagonists. Then you can think of those who are agnostics, they don't care either way. Yeah, whatever. I'm just doing my job. And then you have what we can call the sort of brand ambassadors if you will or advocates. We'll get to advocacy in a bit, but the point being here is acceptance is all about the role you play. Is this right for the brand or not? And for these three different populations I will have to engage in a different strategy. The ones who are antagonist, pay to bring them on board, because they are motivated very often because otherwise they wouldn't be against the brand. They actually care. They just don't believe in it or I just might have to exit the agnostics. I then have to think about how do I actually get them to believe in it which leads us to the next A, which is advocacy. And advocacy is all about the personal motivation I derived from the brand. If you think about many of the guest videos and I started thinking about the idea of purpose behind the brand, does this motivate you? Are you behind the brand? And this is where purpose becomes very, very important, and it's not just organizational purpose. You really have to think about is this core to the brand? Do I believe I'm having a positive effect on someone, our consumers out there, and do I personally get motivated by that? And typically, people do get motivated by making a difference in other people's' lives. And when we see brands fail, it's often because people are no longer motivated internally to the organization. So this is really critical component. And it's probably one of the biggest aspects in business is that we think about the engagement of our employees. And there is this research that some of you might be familiar with or this concept which is called the service profit chain by Heskett and colleagues, and, it's a very simple concept. But one I think is actually not true, at least not in all situations. Which is that happy employees make happy customers. Now if you think about that relationship, is this really true? Are there things that make are employees happy? Also the things that then translate into behaviors that make our customers happy. So it doesn't make perfect sense to me, that relationship, and if you think about some of the engagement scores. Like Gallop has a Q12 index, one of the questions which happens to correlate with engagement is I have a best friend at work. Now this just reminds me, showing up at a retail store where the staff is busy talking to each other because they have a best friend at work, ignoring the customers. Again, I'm not sure exactly how some of those measures correlate with customer satisfaction. So In one of my research projects for the big global Telco, I looked at this relationship, and what we were able to do is examine this relationship between employee happiness and customer satisfaction at a very direct level. So the traditional research on the service profit chain basically looked at different banks. And they found that the banks where the employees were happy, the customers were also happy. Now there's a lot of problems with this kind of research because it could just be that if you're in a bank in a nice neighborhood, you have rich customers, you put your best employees there to serve these customers. These employees simply are happier no matter where you put them and these customers, they expect a certain level of service and they get it, they're happy. What I really need to do is within this bank, how about the employees that are engaged versus not engaged. And when they have these service encounters with the customers, is it sort of a closed feedback loop? Are they happier employees leading to more satisfaction? And I did that research and I found absolutely no relationship so I had call center employes, I knew how engaged they were. And I knew how the customer rated the call at the end of the call, zero correlation. Some very disengaged employees provided very good service and resulted in happy customers. And very engaged employees, they loved their work, they were happy to be there, but the customer might not have been happy at the end of the call. So what we did is we added a few other questions which were simply about the brand, they related to the brand promise. And this brand was offering to make life easy for the customer, to be inspiring, those kind of deliverables that they promised. And each question simply asked, are you experiencing these values internally in your job? So, do you find your job inspiring? Do you find things easy at your work or do you find them difficult and complicated. The hypothesis was you find things difficult and complicated and not inspiring you're not going to provide that kind of service to your customers. Now those two simple measures, just as an example, explain about 23% of the variance in customer satisfaction. So what you have to understand is this survey we did is done once a year with these employees, and the customer satisfaction happened at different times we did it a month before and afterwards, and we were able to correlate that, so very independent datasets. So there's no kind of halo effect where the same person is providing both of these ratings, and that's a very big number, 23 percent. So the takeaway there is not the fact that employees are engaged but they're engaged with your strategy. They kind of sense and feel your strategy as part of their work, and that's where the advocacy comes from. And my assumption is, that you can really undermine, and destroy that link. If you don't live the values internally, it's going to be very, very difficult, to live them externally. Now the critical part then we move into actually delivering on the process and I call that integration and there's 2 aspects of it. The first is action, do I actually know what to do in order to deliver on the brand. So imagine the fact that you have employees, they know you're brand, they think branding is important, they are motivated by it, but they don't know what to do. It's sometimes not obvious how to deliver on the brand. Okay? And that's that loop, do I know what to do? Am I clear about what I need to do, my job? Sometimes I'm not in a customer-focusing position, but I'm serving somebody who's serving the customer. So do I know how my actions affect The customer down the line. Do I have that line of sight? And this is what this point is about. There's a nice saying, which is attributed to Confucius, which says I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. And what that really tells you if I don't know the actions that go with a brand, maybe I don't actually understand the brand as much as I know. So some of these different aspects of internal brand health also relate to each other. Now, the final one is really about adherence, do things stick. Does the environment, the culture of the organization, the rewards, recognition, the systems, the processes, do they actually help live their brand? So, imagine the following that if your brand is all about customer care, but then all you get rewarded for are sales. And caring about your customer takes away from your time of selling. Well then you actually have metrics which undermine the brand promise. That's where this coat hanger comes in. Right? If you're offering a certain level of service, and then you reward staff for saving costs, well maybe that actually undermines the brand at the end of the day. So, it's all about how these things fit together, and employees are quite good at understanding this is what management says, but this is how we get treated at the end of the day. Yes, we're supposed to offer expert advice, but we don't get trained at the end of the day. We have to do it on our own time. Yes, we're told to provide customer care. But you know what? In the call center, we are rewarded based on the number of calls per hour. So there's a disconnect between what we want to achieve with the brand, and what we reward people for and the culture of the organization. So that was [INAUDIBLE] the 6As. And that's really the internal aspect of brand health. And as I said, if you think about the external measurement of brand health, to a large degree that's looking backwards, maybe looking forward with some of the trends, but really internally, that is a leading indicator of how things might shape in the future. And I think it's more and more important, it's an early indicator therefore, to change things internally before you can see the results externally maybe in your financial results. It's a very important aspect of brand health, one I do not see implemented in many organizations. [MUSIC]
