Why Do You Need Brand Training?

Picture this: the marketing team of a health insurance company is seeking to improve the customer experience associated with their brand. Their solution is to send the message that the company’s number one priority is their patients’ welfare. However, one year and a hefty portion of marketing budget later, the company finds that patients do not report any improvement in their experience and that public perception of the brand has remained as stagnant as ever.

Where did our hypothetical company go wrong? What the marketing team may not have realized is that this messaging missed its most important audience—the company’s employees.

Your employees aren’t just the face of your brand; they’re its lifeblood. Innovative and impactful brand training turns your workforce into brand ambassadors and spokespeople who can influence customer perceptions of the brand at every interaction.

Put simply, brand training is educating your employees about your brand and what it stands for. The goal is to create consistent messaging, internally and externally, and to foster a culture that understands and promotes the brand’s values on all levels of the corporate ladder. Good brand alignment helps employees connect with the brand on a level beyond the superficial, creating a consistent customer experience.

The missing link in our hypothetical company’s strategy was neglecting to market their brand promise to their employees like they did to their potential clients. If the message employees were given was to prioritize cutting costs without touching on the brand promise the company hoped to promote externally, they wouldn’t have been equipped with the knowledge, context, and tools to bring that brand promise to life. It’s no wonder clients didn’t feel that their wellbeing was put first.

Why is Brand Training Worth the Investment?

Plenty of ideas sound good on paper before you take the price tag into account. And since almost every company out there has a brand promise and a strategy for marketing it, some of these companies consider that to be enough. They may assume that their employees understand the brand well enough to work with it effectively.

However, the status quo is just not sustainable in the hyper-competitive modern market. In order to compete and to avoid the risks of falling behind, a paradigm shift in how we see employees and their relation to brand is essential.

The fact is, according to a Gallup poll, only 41% of workers say they strongly agree with the statement “I know what my company stands for and what makes our brand different from our competitors.” Even more striking, workers who were not executives or managers—the employees most likely to interact with customers—only showed 37% agreement.

Those 63% of employees who do not strongly agree represent an untapped potential for organizational growth, an increase in customer retention (which can bring profit margins up substantially), and a higher level of brand alignment both internally and externally.

The question isn’t “can I afford brand training?” It’s “can I afford to go without it?”

How Can AllenComm Help You Foster Brand Alignment?

It’s easy to underestimate the effect that internal brand awareness has on employees—according to Deloitte’s 2018 survey, the average marketing budget only allocates 4.2% to brand training—but investing in brand training can lead to serious payoff. The right approach, and access to the right tools, helps you turn your employees into brand ambassadors.

Working with AllenComm to develop brand training can help turn ideas into realities that have potential for major change within your company. Our solutions can implement innovative ideas in a way that reaches your entire employee base—and makes a difference.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series, where we discuss what makes brand training effective and how our best practices make a big impact for your brand and employees.