Selling Your Brand Internally

One of the most important places to spend time and energy “selling” your brand is internally. No audience is more important to have completely understand and believe your brand position. The reason should be apparent: if your staff doesn’t believe in your brand position, they cannot support it. Therefore, you must spend enough time visiting and revisiting the brand position with your staff. To do this, consider implementing “Brand Camps” every 3-4 months. Brand Camps are an excellent tool for ensuring everyone is aligned with the brand position. Best practices for a brand camp put them somewhere between 2 and 6 hours in length and can be either a partial group of employees or all the employees as your business needs dictate. There are several components of a brand camp:

1. Manifesto. Share the manifesto – go around the room and ask everyone to share what it means to them. (You can do this in several ways: assign it in small groups beforehand for skits to be presented, ask each person to speak to it, or provide an example of the manifesto in action – whatever works in your culture.
2. Keep doing. This is an excellent opportunity to find out what you’re already doing that works well. Asking what you should keep doing will set the tone for the remainder of the session and allow you to celebrate what should be celebrated—the places and spaces where you are consistent with living your brand. It will also set a great tone for what comes next.
3. Start doing. Collaborate with the employee team on what else your company can do to enhance its brand position. (Ask them to go away in small groups and come back to the whole group to present their best three ideas on what more can be done to make the brand real. Then, ask the whole group to pick the top three that will be implemented in the next 30 days.)
4. Stop doing. Ask them what the company is doing that is not supporting the brand. (Depending on the safety of your culture, you may need to ask them to write the ideas down and put them into a box. Then, ask each team member to come up and randomly pick one of the ideas out of the box to read aloud. Be sure to reinforce that all ideas are valid and essential – DO NOT get defensive. Use all the employees in the room to find a way to do it in better harmony with the brand position.)
5. Commitment. Before you adjourn brand camp, ask your staff to commit to living thriving every day. (You can do this in any way that works for your company. Ideas include going around the room and asking each person to elaborate on what they will do differently because of brand camp, having everyone stand and recite the manifesto in unison, or creating brand accountability buddies where each set of two agrees to hold each other accountable for living the brand until the next brand camp.)

The important thing about taking time out to hold a brand camp is to realign everyone to the brand position and give your brand the lift that comes when every employee is pulling toward the same outcome.