Employer Branding: Your Employees are Global. Is your Brand?
How do you create a powerful employer brand when your staff is spread across the country, or around the world?
How do you make your brand understood and appreciated by people from different cultures?
How do you encourage a common intent, attitude and behavior among people working in far-off locations?
One way is to transform the way your think about your employer brand and how it works in the real world.
Rethink your brand’s “Why”
Start by rethinking how your brand can be more personally relevant and emotionally important to your employees. One way is to adopt a powerful brand promise. A people-centric, emotional-laden and meaningful purpose helps your people understand what your brand represents, and why that matters to others and themselves. As a high-order thought designed to evoke common human emotions, it will more readily cross cultural boundaries.
Express your “why” in human terms
Next, translate your brand’s promise, moving it from its C-Suite orientation to strategy delivered in a human language that is focused on making the desired outcomes of the brand far more meaningful to each individual employee on a personal level, given their responsibilities and job function within the company.
Show employees how they can help
Finally, show your employees how they can help your brand achieve its brand promise. Show them how the brand should ideally behave, and how they should ideally behave when representing the brand. Create a more unified brand culture — and, hence, more unified global brand presence — by encouraging and rewarding meaningful brand behavior.
Global organization. Global brand power.
As the new behavior of your employees drives communications and interactions in a meaningful way, your local customers and prospects start to better understand and appreciate your brand’s meaningful intent. As such, they start seeing your brand as more unique, more appealing and more desirable.
It all starts with a big idea.
But it only actually happens when that idea is designed to be “viral” in nature, and as individual employees around the world choose to behave in a more meaningful way.
For those interested. Additional reading: Brand Behavior Drives Business Results
Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.
Originally published at blog.emotivebrand.com on March 20, 2013.
