It’s ten years since The Brand Inside opened its doors for business in Africa. Our intention was to help companies deliver on their promises to customers. Unlike other consultancies we took the idea of ‘brand’ as our North Star. We asked, why shouldn’t something so persuasive for external customers be brought inside the business to inspire employee behaviour? Back then, a question troubling leadership teams was: ‘Why don’t our employees act like company owners?’
The answer was simple: few African business owners tried to create any sense of equity for their staff. In a society where it is customary to share resources through good times and bad, the disappointment caused by this resulted in widespread employee disengagement. The worst on the planet in fact. South Africa led the way with 9% of its workforce engaged but 45% actively disengaged.
As Africa moved rapidly from command to market economies, a second question kept leadership teams awake at night: ‘Why don’t our employees walk and talk the brand?’
The answer to that was also simple. Few companies bothered to inform employees what their corporate or product and service brands actually stood for. Let alone persuade them that the purpose of these brands was valuable in a broader sense than just creating profit. Leaders’ pride in their brands was fueled by what their peer group or direct subordinates told them. Or what spouses reported back from their social circles. So the concept of a brand being anything more than a logo was a surprise to employees.
The Brand Inside was founded on the insight that you can spend millions of dollars building a smart HQ, putting up branded signage, advertising, promoting, sponsoring, sampling and entertaining. But if your staff don’t understand what your brand is promising (and why) they won’t know how to behave when delivering it. Nor will they feel any sense of ownership.
Ten years on, much has changed, and not just thanks to the work of The Brand Inside! Many businesses in Africa share the global realisation that the much-vaunted Mission, Vision and Values set isn’t much help when it comes to persuading employees how to behave at work. Some are now actively sharing their brand’s belief, promise and personality with their staff and finding that employees get a better feeling for how they should act. It’s much easier for a person to be ‘engaging, smart and open’ than it is for them to be ‘professional, innovative and transparent’.
Better still, many companies are now inviting employees to tell them what needs to change in their company’s culture, policies and procedures to make brand delivery easier.
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