One of the biggest challenges marketers face is employee turnover. Not only does it affect the continuity of your team and disrupt marketing operations but it can also adversely affect the outward-facing consistency of your brand.
New people may apply their personal perspectives and individual tactics to your brand, which may begin to “Frankenstein” a brand that once had strong consistency. This phenomenon can derail customer perception and company performance.
Even with a trove of historical creative assets and copies of the brand book, your new teammates may not grasp the carefully crafted, important nuances that breathe life into your brand. While they may be able to recite the brand pillars at a superficial level, they don’t quite understand the soul of the brand, yet. This causes misaligned messaging, creating a disconnect for your audience — ultimately affecting your bottom line.
Not sure if your brand is at risk?
If most of the people around you have been with the company for less than two years, the brand has probably already started to degrade. Take the time to look for the signs that may not be immediately apparent. You don’t want to wait to see work in the wild that doesn’t meet customer's expectations. Most often, missteps show up in the inability of new employees to understand your core customer. If new employees don’t have a solid understanding of the role that the brand plays in your customers’ lives, then missteps with the brand are sure to follow.
Can your people articulate why customers choose your brand over competitors? Do they know what key insights motivate your customers to buy or recommend you to others?
If your people don’t know your customer well enough, then it’s time to take the right steps to carefully remediate the issue. Then, if you do, it can give you the potential to catalyze the brand to new, more powerful heights.
The 4 Critical Steps to Rebuild Your Brand Even Stronger
In order to repair the brand, you must take the time to empathize with and relate to your new people, build relationships to get alignment, and explain the brand’s role in customers’ lives.
1. Empathize with your new people
We must first dive into the challenges your new employees deal with and how those can degrade your brand. As the economy becomes more volatile, there is less and less margin for error. Your new employees feel a constant pressure to perform: They’re trying to forge new relationships, learn new bureaucratic corporate processes, and pick up after their predecessors, all while trying to drive positive channel performance. With so much to juggle, they can often struggle to not only deliver on objectives, but also keep a keen eye on the brand voice.
It is important to recognize these new responsibilities and challenges to help prioritize them, while also building confidence about what they’re doing successfully.
2. Build relationships
Once your new people realize that you understand the challenges they face in the new environment, you can begin to articulate what is happening to the brand and the associated risks.
Recognize that your new employees are trying their best, and give them the opportunity to reflect candidly about what is and isn’t working.
You can look at this as an opportunity to gain fresh perspectives on improving the organization. This step will also get people to understand how interconnected their work is, as well as help create some consistency in the brand’s expression.
Ask questions like: What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? What should we continue doing, but make better? Keep the conversation open, and, don’t shut anything down. Once the challenges and opportunities are on the table, get the team “out in the field” to talk with customers and ask questions. Doing so will build bonds with one another and customers.
Do you see any overlap between your team discussion and customer discussion? That’s where you’ll find real opportunities for positive change.
3. Get alignment on marketing and business strategies
Your business strategy informs your marketing strategy, so it’s important to make sure your team understands both. Give them a rundown of the company’s objectives, top marketing goals, and the long-term strategy that moves the needle in the short term. Apply as much as you can from what you learned in the “Start/Stop/Keep” exercise we mentioned above.
It’s also essential to define the role new employees play in contributing to the company’s objectives. Doing so will help them understand what part of the funnel they are responsible for, what the buyer is feeling at that point in the funnel, how their work is intended to influence the buyer, and ultimately, how their work connects upstream to a particular objective.
4. Connect your people to your customers
Finally, once people feel connected to one another and understand their role in the strategy, you need to get your marketers connected to your customers. Remember that fresh eyes can provide fresh insights.
Regardless of industry, you can always find a way to help your people interact with or observe your customers. As a tip, look for ways to operationalize this connection. When your team engages with customers and with one another, you begin adding fuel to the marketing fire. This connection will lead to a greater understanding of not only your brand, but also the value it provides to your customers. Beyond just preserving the brand you had built with the prior team members, this new group will likely see things in new ways and help you take the brand to new levels.
By following the steps above, your new employees will have a crystal-clear understanding of the customer, the brand, and how they can contribute. They should feel invigorated and their fresh perspectives, now better aligned with the brand, will set your organization on the path to success in the new year and beyond.
You don’t have to weather it alone. Let our experts work with you to create a successful marketing strategy, so your brand not only survives — but thrives. Contact us today.