Connecting employees to the brand

Corporate design and communications agency SAS recently welcomed one of its biggest-ever audiences to a breakfast meeting focusing on "brand impact from the inside out."  Held at London's Andaz hotel on the morning of Thursday 13^th November, the event featured a number of case-studies from different organisations as well as an overview from client partner Kevin Keohane, head of brand and employee engagement.

Introducing the session, marketing and research director Jason Frank stressed the key linkage between engagement, customers and profit, and cited US research which revealed that some two-thirds (68%) of customer losses could be directly attributed to the bad attitude of staff.

Kevin Keohane suggested that, when it came to proving the value of employee engagement, "the jury was already in."  Research demonstrates that companies with better engaged people tend to outperform their competitors, while the quality of employees' interaction with customers is seen to contribute to (or, if poor, detract from) an organisation's brand and employer reputation.  Engaged employees are not only more productive but also their organisation's most compelling advocates, and as such key to customer loyalty.

Kevin maintained that, in difficult times, it's even more important to focus on employee engagement in order to defend market share.  This calls for a properly ‘joined-up' strategy between corporate comms, brand/marketing, HR and internal comms.  Bringing the brand to life, utilising social media effectively, adopting a credible tone of voice and using participative rather than ‘traditional' information flows are all crucial to making this happen.

Case-studies followed from Richard Lloyd (head of brand, people and culture at BT) and Amy Kilbane (European marketing manager at economics and finance consultancy LECG), demonstrating the business benefits of effective engagement for both large and smaller-scale employers.

Then Marine Wallace, senior consultant at Publicis Consultants/Van Sluis, and Ian O'Hare, head of internal comms at AXA UK, co-presented a session on a project to communicate the latter group's new brand signature via an online discussion forum to all of its worldwide employees at one go, using the unique Multilogue social media platform.  This entailed email invitations to some 133,000 employees, around 40% of whom logged on during the 24-hour global online forum.

The statistics are impressive: the event involved employees across some 59 countries, using nine different languages.  Around 60 videos were prepared for webcasting across 20 different discussion forums, and some 54,000 people took part, posting almost 20,000 comments in the process.  Feedback was excellent, with the majority of employees happy to embrace the new brand signature.  Most importantly, people felt that they'd been involved, and given the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to live up to the brand values.  (A further unlooked-for bonus, according to Ian, was an engaged and energised IT department!)

SAS's next breakfast event, on Thursday 11^th December, will focus on the creation of ‘leaner, meaner' graduate marketing strategies.