Designing a purpose-driven internal brand

Referring to Pink's business operating system during his presentation at the Happiness Matters conference held in Cape Town earlier this week, Gordon believes that an organisation's internal brand resonates around those three elements.

Kirby Gordon

The keystone

• In terms of autonomy, employees should be allowed to own the internal brand and determine how to externalise it in their everyday work.
  
• Mastery requires that, while the employee plays a big role, organisations need to take responsibility in making recognition part of the daily experience, and the brand can play a role here.
  
• Purpose, how people feel about their place in an organisation and how this fits in a broader sense into society, is the keystone of an internal brand, said Gordon.

"Purpose is the keystone because your brand needs to embody what your purpose as an organisation is and it needs to constantly remind people about that. Purpose is the one element when we're designing an internal brand that we really need to play with and play with carefully because it is the biggest and most direct thing that we can communicate from an internal brand perspective," he said.

Uncovering purpose

Traditionally, marketers are known to paint masks, explained Gordon. What marketers so often do is paint a pretty picture for the external world. Internal branding, however, cannot be a mask, he said.

"Forming an internal brand is more of a palaeontological process - we have to excavate what's already there and then pull it together in a useful and meaningful sense. It's not about creating masks - it's about finding that autonomy, that mastery, and most importantly, that purpose and understanding what that purpose is. That purpose doesn't need to be created - it needs to be uncovered," said Gordon.

While having corporate values is good, he went on to say, imposing them onto employees isn't: "You cannot sit in a boardroom and create this brand, sit and write this positioning statement, or this mission or this vision and then go out to your employees and say, 'Thou shalt be South Africa's favourite airline'. It doesn't work that way."

Whose job is it anyway?

As far as whose job it is to design an organisation's internal brand, Gordon believes that while it should be a collective effort, anyone who cares about customer experience and employee experience should be the person who starts creating that brand.

He cautioned though that if the internal brand that manifests itself is somehow contrary to what exists in the outside world, then there's probably a problem with that organisation's marketing: "There's nothing authentic about saying you have a product or service that does xyz if that's not how your people feel, if that's not the purpose they're bringing to their world, so those two need to correlate," explained Gordon.

For more info, go to www.happinessmatters.co.za.

Kirby Gordon has a special passion for the science of marketing that has led him quite predictably into the field of e-commerce. His aim is to bridge the gap between traditional advertising and promotion, and digital marketing, and to use the former to drive critical mass and efficiency in the latter when it comes to the acquisition of new customers and sales.