Have you never experienced brands that don’t mirror by any stretch of the imagination what has been advertised or pushed via “paid Media”, if you haven’t, you must have been living under a rock or have been immensely fortunate I am amazed at the amount of money that is spent on creating a consumer promise that gets thrashed when consumer meets brand or employee meets organization. Like Ali famously said, “everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face “.
Ill-advised people processes where every person is intent on closing the sale as against creating an experience –but the million $ question is –Have they been articulated on what the finer points of the brand and intended user experience ought to be? Isn’t your employee your first customer for your brand or organization? when an organization spends huge amounts of money in understanding and curating what the brand ought to mean in the consumers’ minds –they lose the plot very often within the mind of the employee.
Where would you begin and what are the possibilities, if you truly believed employees ought to be treated like customers?
Would you know them better? would you walk in their shoes and ‘breathe the same air “ with regard to your organisation as a brand or would you hurriedly rush through appraisal or feedback sessions –listening to all suggestions on improvement and not doing anything about it?
Would you be an order taker (listen to consumer demands) or be ahead of the curve (my employee hasn’t thought about this feature, let me work on it to delight him )
High-value customers and High-Performance individuals need extra attention? Do they always get it?
All it takes for a multi-million $ campaign to come unraveling in the mind of a consumer is a bad customer experience. All it takes for a new employee is a single incident where the stated values of the organisation and the lived values are very different. What would it take for an employee to truly internalize his employer brand? A strong alignment of identity and values between organisation and employee. How many organizations have abandoned the process of identifying, articulating and giving concrete examples of what their values meant and why those specific values were chosen.
I had given serious thought to tattooing my employer brand, a brand I had grown to revere and was immensely proud of, till I dismissed it as extremely weird, but I wasn’t alone, Jill Abramson – Executive Editor of the New York Times has a tattoo of the Famous “T”.What would it take for an employee to “tattoo “ himself with his employer brand .
Would an employee in your organisation do it?