What is Internal Branding
Internal Branding is a corporate strategy measure to empower and motivate employees to not only retain the brand promise but to “live” it. To do this, organizations involve employees in the process of brand development, inform them about the brand, and encourage them to feel inspired about the brand in order to influence their behavior to support the brand. Internal branding is essential because brands grow from the inside out and in fact contribute to increased sales.
To measure internal branding we can use a framework of 6 A’s of internal brand health.
1 . Attention
2 . Awareness
3 . Acceptance
4 . Advocacy
5. Action (most critical)
6 . Adherence
Each factor adds up to a measurement system where you can get a heat map of the internal brand health of the organization. So you can assess your organization and can look at the pockets where the brand is delivering and where it’s not delivering. Finally, you can engage in requisite action as a result.   Let’s discuss it in detail:
Attention
The first aspect of measuring the internal brand health is to understand if everyone is giving attention to the definition and do all the employees understand the importance of their brand promise? For example, operations have different KPIs in their job and they are not paying attention to the image or promise that the senior level wants to portray. They probably don’t even realize what they’re doing in terms of your brand. So it attention should be given to it.
Awareness
Most employees do not understand their company’s strategy and in turn, they don’t understand the company’s brand promise. It is important if you can boil down the brand promise not to six, seven, eight different aspects, but maybe one or two and make everyone aware about it.
If you do a preliminary internal review, you’ll see that across your organization, people have quite a different sense of what your brand is about.
Acceptance
This is really when it gets to the personal level.
Do I personally believe in this brand’s 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.
Segment your population into Antagonists (the ones who don’t care) and brand ambassadors or advocates who will make sure your brand message is spread.
Advocacy
Advocacy is all about the personal motivation you derived from the brand.
Do your employees believe that they are positively affecting someone or some cause? A lot of people do get motivated by making a difference in other people’s’ lives.
They sense and feel your strategy as part of their work, and that’s where the advocacy comes from.
Action
It is one of the most important as a lot of companies fail to implement it even after defining and designing an excellent brand structure.
Do your employees actually know what to do in order to deliver on the brand promise?
So imagine the fact that you have employees, they know your 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 promise. So creating an action plan and measuring its strength is essential to measure the brand health. Reach out to us at info@technocratiq.com for a strong action plan.
Adherence
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 is for sales. So, it’s all about how these things fit together.
Yes, you are told to provide customer care but you know what? In a call center, you 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 build the culture of the organization.
That’s really the internal aspect of brand health.
Conclusion
Internal Brand Health is an early indicator therefore, you need to change things internally before you can see the results externally. It’s a significant aspect of brand health, one we do not see implemented in many organizations.
TIQ forms a perfect alternative to solve all your queries and provide you a proper Brand Strategy. For questions or to get your company’s internal brand health monitored, drop us an email at info@technocratiq.com or call at +91 798 25 34 881.