Podcast
#221: How to Align Employees With Your Brand Story
#221: How to Align Employees With Your Brand Story
As a Business of Story listener, you know that having a clear brand story is important and can have a massive impact on your organization’s growth. But what if, after making a hefty investment in time and resources to craft your narrative, you can’t gain buy-in from your people? This not only depletes your efforts, but even worse – can actually cost you business. To overcome this, it’s vital to get your people aligned with your brand story to help you win customers, grow repeat business and word of mouth marketing.
Here to show you how is Christopher Wallace, Co-Founder and President of InnerView, a marketing consulting firm that helps companies effectively align their brand strategy with their customer-facing employees and partners. InnerView was founded because “we saw organizations invest so much to reach their customers with a message that was never actually delivered when it came to that point of customer contact due to their own employees lack of buy-in,” says Christopher.
To further his understanding, Christopher co-authored the study, Have Your Story Straight? Why Brand Message Dilution Hurts in the Experience Economy and shares his findings.
While the study found more than one cause for this misalignment, one of the most surprising reasons is due to leadership’s failure to empower their employees to be brand storytellers. Fortunately for the leaders that recognize this missed opportunity, there are solutions they can begin to implement immediately. For instance, employees need to be made aware of new information and initiatives but in order to get them excited and invested, you need to do more than just tell them facts.
We found that while emails and product trainings are the most common ways to get information out, what is really driving the needle is peer to peer interactions, events, interactive webinars; you want it to be experienceable. ~Christopher Wallace
Creating an experience around new information and initiatives creates excitement, shows leadership’s investment in its employees, and propels the brand story forward.
Finding ways to get employees to interact with each other allows for employees to influence one another to buy-in on ideas – versus the company telling them or handing them a script, because that doesn’t work anymore. You need engagement to drive behavior. ~Christopher Wallace
Discussed in this Episode
- The ROI of gaining employee buy-in to your brand story
- How to leverage story to gain honest feedback from your employees
- Why you should care about your employees’ understanding of your organization’s brand story
- How to deliver messages that will resonate with your employees
- Examples of brands that have a disconnect between their brand promise and customer experience, and vice versa
Resources & Links
- Have Your Story Straight? Why Brand Message Dilution Hurts in the Experience Economy
- InnerView
- Christopher Wallace’s Linkedin
- InnerView’s Twitter
- InnerView’s Instagram
- InnerView’s Facebook
- #215: Why Your Audience’s Voice is Crucial in Your Storytelling
- Craft Your Purpose-Driven Brand Story
- Business of Story listeners, please take this short survey
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