Brand is probably the most valuable asset for an organization and one of the best ways to enhance it is to find the right advocates, people that really love your company and have the genuine desire of sharing their passion with friends. In fact, customers don’t really like having a relationship with a brand itself, they rather have a relationship with other people. Thus, someone who is totally into your brand, believes in your organization and feels to have a connection with your values, represents an incredible source of value for your company.
The question is: how can customers feel this deep attachment to an organization if its employees don’t? This is why a wise manager should work in order to transform all the employees in the very first advocates of the brand. Nowadays, the great majority of people working for a company talks about their employers through social media anyway, so the point is to train them to do it in the appropriate way. It’s not simple, since of course employees cannot be forced to become ambassadors or to share a certain kind of content, but it completely worth the effort: having delighted employees creates a hard to replicate competitive advantage.
Employees cannot become brand advocates if they don’t have a clear picture in their minds of what the brand values and culture really are. They need to understand the brand and the goal of a good manager is to help them to do it. The first requirement for a company is to have a well-known, strong, and distinctive vision. This should also help to obtain a good consistency in the messages spread by the employees. A good practice is to establish a communication team sending to all the people employed in the organization messages regarding brand, objectives and initiatives. Other communication channels as meetings and speeches are also very effective.
Dell employees at a regional meeting
Another important step is to clarify what does make the brand valuable and helpful for the entire society. Employees want to be part of something big and good; they love to feel that they are contributing to make some difference in the world. If they perceive that what the company is doing does actually matter, they will spontaneously share it with friends, family and other colleagues. What is fundamental is to generate a feeling of pride and gratification associated to the brand. For this reason, corporate social responsibility initiatives are the most appreciated and promoted by employees.
McDonald’s employees taking part to a charity event
The top leadership should be the supreme example of brand advocacy: the CEO needs to be the most proud ambassador of the brand, if he wants to see all the other employees doing the same. Companies should also try to recognize and prize employees who share positive content regarding their brand; perhaps through small but meaningful actions, as commenting, retweeting or liking employees’ posts.
To conclude, here there’s a link to a video of Starbucks president Cliff Burrows talking about how the company deals with serious topics as diversity and inclusion. Notice how he calls employees “partners”, fostering their sense of beloning. According to me, it is a valid example of what a manager could do to make people working for or with him aware and proud of what they are doing:
http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/community/diversity-and-inclusion
Sources:
http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/60-million-employees-social-media-advocate/295823/