“Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business.” Steve Forbes

From the marketing department to HR, to Finance, Legal, R&D, and everyone in between – the supreme importance of the brand is recognized by all across the enterprise.

As you know, your brand is not your logo. It’s not your slogan. It’s so much more than that, because your brand is everything you are. It’s what the world thinks, feels, and experiences when they hear or see your company name or slogan.

Its power to make or break a company, to grow or stifle sales, to attract or repel potential employees cannot be understated.

Consistency is the name of the brand game

“The brand promise must be clear with every interaction each stakeholder experiences. That means every part of the organization has a role to play in branding from research and development to finance to talent development.” (Forbes)

One of the most important tenets of nurturing the value of the brand and ensuring that it impacts its audience – whether customers, prospects, partners, investors, or employees – is that it be met consistently in every medium, on every channel, and with any company stakeholder.

That’s why it’s so important for the enterprise to ensure that every employee is aligned with the brand, its essence, its promise, and how it should be articulated to the outside world.

For, if employees, especially those who engage with external parties regularly, are not aligned with the brand, then the company will not be able to align with customers, partners, investors, the media, etc.

The makings of a beautiful partnership

This is where marketing and internal communications (ICOMM) intersect. With marketing being the brand owners, and with employees being the company’s most strategic brand ambassadors, it is incumbent upon the organization’s marketers and ICOMM teams to come together to ensure that they collaborate on internal brand alignment.

Many global brands have recognized the critical role employees play in their brand efforts.

For example, Dell has succeeded in inspiring 10,000 internal workforce and channel partners to take on the role of brand ambassador and go online to evangelize the promise of the Dell brand.

GE also implemented “an army of over 13,000 brand ambassadors” who have been revered internally for “yielding in fantastic reach.”

And, when Deloitte was selected to be the Official Professional Services Sponsor for the US Olympic Committee during the Summer Olympics in 2012, it enrolled 7,200 employee ambassadors who achieved remarkable results, with 461K social shares, 720K clicks, and 385M social impressions.

Shared expertise, shared objectives

When Marketing and ICOMM collaborate on empowering employees to be brand ambassadors, they not only generate clarity and drive alignment, but they also gain a unique opportunity to improve engagement, commitment, and loyalty.

And, the collaboration between Marketing and ICOMM could not be more natural. Each team brings a deep expertise in crafting engaging and converting messages, as well as in:

• Defining who their target audience is (who is the persona being targeted?)
• Tailoring messages that resonate with the target persona/audience
• Ensuring that messaging across all touchpoints and by all stakeholders are consistent

Getting started

So, where should they start?

With the contents.

Namely, it is critical that all employees, and not just the brand ambassadors be able to answer the following questions in alignment with the guidelines and vision of the organization:

• What is the company trying to be?
• Whom does it serve?
• What value does it offer?
• What are the company’s mission and vision?

The next step is to find the most effective and engaging way to communicate the answers to these questions along with the brand’s essence, promise, and elements. And the trick is – to do it in such a way that the medium itself is wholly brand-aligned by default.

How video gets the brand job done

Here is where video comes into play. Did you know that employee communications that are conveyed with video earn a 3x higher click-through rate than any other type of content?

When Marketing can put together a series of videos (that are brand aligned) to share with employees in general and brand ambassadors in particular, all about the ins and outs of the company’s brand, the chance for engagement is much higher, as is memorability. According to cognitive scientist, Jerome Bruner, a video increases the chances of a message being memorable by 22 times!

Raising the bar on consistency

Now, to take this one step further – enabling employees to share videos that are brand aligned is also a great way to ensure that those who tell the story to the world tell it in a consistent way that reflects the accuracy of the brand promise and essence.

Here, Marketing and ICOMM can play a pivotal role not only as protector of the brand (Marketing), but also as empowerer of the employee (ICOMM).

When employees are provided with the freedom to articulate and the independence to create – they are much more inspired to be proactive in their brand ambassador duties. And, when the tools that are at their disposal have a built-in mechanism to ensure alignment, then both Marketing and ICOMM can put their mind at ease and feel confident that brand guidelines are being adhered to.

How Wochit Studio is your strongest brand ally

And, this is how Wochit Studio can help.

Wochit Studio is a cloud-based video creation platform that is designed to empower anyone and everyone in the organization (not just editors), regardless of whether or not they have a background or knowledge in video editing, to create high-quality, professional-grade videos that are deeply engaging and brand aligned.

The platform offers a straightforward UX that simplifies editing, smart editing features with many options for customizations, an extensive pre-licensed library of 200 million images and videos, and myriad built-in templates.

By creating templates that include brand colors, fonts, logo, and any other brand assets that are relevant to the organizations, Marketing can then empower employees and ambassadors to use these templates freely to create videos that evangelize the brand as easily as they write emails.

And, since these templates can be centrally managed, brand consistency is always maintained.

It’s a win-win – for the enterprise and its employees, for Marketing and ICOMM, for brand alignment and creative freedom. Doesn’t get better than that.