Every manager knows that dissatisfied employees are not good for business. Disengagement costs the U.S. economy roughly $300 billion a year in lost productivity, according to a poll by the Gallup Organization. Yet many people still don’t recognize that employees who are satisfied and motivated can significantly raise the bottom line, says Carol Parish, managing director for Enterprise IG in the United States. Parish and three other brand specialists recently addressed students, faculty, and guests at a forum on Internal Branding, sponsored by The Emory Marketing Institute (EMI). EMI is based in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University.

“All corporations should recognize the importance of a strong, powerful brand that bonds with their customers, and the companies that are most successful with that outperform the Standard & Poors index really nicely,” Parish says. “It’s a lesser known fact that companies with a high rating from both the consumers and their employees double that return. It’s extraordinary. If you can get the employees on board, what amazing business results you can have.”

Research shows that employees prefer working for companies that have great reputations, says Rajendra Srivastava, a professor of marketing at Emory’s Goizueta Business School and director of EMI. “Satisfied customers are better to deal with, and satisfied employees give better service. At the end of the day, while customers appreciate better quality products and services (i.e., a great brand), employees derive satisfaction from being part of an enterprise that is associated with an enviable market reputation.”

Parish illustrates this point with statistics from the banking industry: 68% of employees leave because of poor employee attitude. Forty-one percent of customers are loyal because of a good employee attitude. And the big one: 70% of customer brand perception is determined by experience with people. Those businesses who employ a “Director of First Impressions” know what they are talking about.

Enterprise IG, a global brand agency headquartered in London, has been researching this subject for a number of years, notes Parish. “We have a database that includes more than 75,000 employee surveys from around the world. We have found that on average, only about one-third of employees are actually highly engaged champions of their brand,” she says. “There is definitely room for improvement.”

The agency helps companies build employee engagement programs. “We start with what we call the Buy-in Benchmark,” explains Parish. This survey is specially tailored for clients, posing a number of issues. “Every survey measures two major axes: the intellectual action that employees have with their brand and the company; and the emotional commitment to it. From that analysis, we are able to segment employees into four major categories.” These include brand champions, loose cannons, bystanders, and weak links.

“Brand champions are the people who have both the intellectual connection and the emotional commitment,” she continues. “The second most powerful group is the loose cannons. Those are the people that really mean well. They have a strong emotional connection. They are loyal, but they don’t necessarily have the tools or the information with which to actually connect as strongly as they could.”

Most dangerous are the bystanders. “These are people who actually have the information that they need, but they don’t care,” says Parish. “If that population gets out of control, they can actually undermine a brand. We’ve all seen situations where employees have been through a very difficult time. They are jaded, they’ve seen layoffs, and they don’t feel good about it. That’s a very dangerous population.”

The fourth type, the weak links, neither know nor care, says Parish. “Ideally, you want to have a very small percentage of these,” she adds.

“Our studies and our work have shown that clearly there is a very strong link between brand champions and ultimate business results and performance,” Paris says. “Champions actually generate a service, as advocates for products and for their company as a good place to work. Many of us are aware of the huge cost of employee turnover. The ability to think of innovations and be flexible—these translate into casual economic business results.”

Promoting Brand Champions

Internal branding is on the collective minds of many businesses these days. “Internal branding involves insuring all employees of a company understand their role in delivering brand promises,” says Srivastava. “Just as satisfied employees support the brand through superior customer care, disgruntled employees can create havoc through actions such as inadequate, indifferent, or tardy responses to customer requests.”

Steve Cone, managing director and head of advertising and brand management at Citigroup Global Wealth Management, has his own equation for branding: differentiation over surplus.

“We live in a world of surplus,” notes Cone. “In the U.S., give or take, there are about 1,100 types of soda available, 55 brands of toothpaste, and 800 sports shoes. Even museums fight with each other to attract a constituency.”

So what’s the most effective way to reach employees? It’s no different than how most successful marketing and advertising works, says Cone. People buy from people, and people want intimacy from a product. Apple has sold millions of Ipods using these ideas, just me and my tunes. Australia’s current tourism campaign, “So where the bloody hell are you,” uses attitude to grab the inner explorer in every potential vacationer.

“The whole key to success is understanding human nature,” he says. “It’s all about me, me, me. It is creating a sensory experience to go after ‘the me’ in everybody.”

“Life revolves around people and personalities,” adds Cone. He encourages companies to make “rock stars” of their own people, using them in ads and promotions. Dove’s campaign featuring real women, i.e. not skinny models, has set a good example throughout the industry.

Vodafone Case Study

To further illustrate her message, Parish described the work that Enterprise IG has performed with Vodafone, an international telecommunications company.

“Over the last six years, we worked with Vodafone in three phases,” she says. “These three categories of learning had to take place over a period of years. It’s all about how people learn.”

“The first step was sending out information,” she explains. “Then providing some evidence that would lead employees to believe in that information. Finally, if you’re doing this consistently, and strongly, employees will begin to live the brand in a variety of ways. It moves toward that world of perspective in which people are real advocates for the company, its products, and services,” she says.

Consultants at Vodafone began the process by challenging senior management about what was important. What message did management want employees to get? “We created four initial icons, each with a special meaning and message. These icons were shorthand for what was really important to the company,” explains Parish. “Then we demonstrated the icons in a visual campaign. The first icon was passion for customers. Second was passion for our people, creating an environment of caring. The third icon represented the passion for results, how Vodafone as a driven company operates in a competitive industry, constantly trying to acquire new customers without losing current ones. Finally, the fourth icon represented passion for the world around us, acknowledging that there is a bigger world out there.”

Parish also notes the benefits of simplicity. “We believed that if employees only got four things in this campaign, these are the four things that could be relatively easily understood,” Parish adds.

After two-and-a-half years of promoting the icons, “We began moving to the intimate, more personal level,” Parish says. “We created a network of brand ambassadors. We put workshops together for employees, giving more information behind the original four points. We gave them tools and helped them to create a global market operating system.”

It takes more than putting up posters in break rooms. At this stage, Enterprise IG initiated an employee survey in order to better understand how Vodafone was reaching its employees and what was missing. “Then, all the pieces come together—programs, support systems, brand advocacy and it was all built into recruiting, customer service, and even the business relationships with partners.”

Most critical to the program’s success was the support of Vodafone’s leaders. “We actually switched CEOs during the process,” says Parish. “But the new CEO was just as eager. He was very public in saying that everyone is responsible for delivering the brand.”

Parish stresses that building a successful employee engagement program takes time. Like most business decisions, it requires a strategic vision. But it is becoming clear that in today’s business world, companies can’t afford not to engage their greatest asset, their own employees.

Photo: Panelist from left, Roy Young, author of Marketing Champions and director of strategy and development at MarketingProfs.com, an online publisher; Bill Levisay, senior vice president of Immediate Consumption and Customer Marketing, Coca-Cola North America division; Carol Parish and Steve Cone.