Building Go-to Brands from the Inside-Out

Every company is looking for the next big source of growth; but it turns out that, for most companies, they’ve already found it—their employees. New data backs that up. If you want to maximize impact with customers, you can do that only from the inside out—by focusing on your employees first and then empowering them to deliver the brand to customers.  

Over the past several years, we’ve analyzed some of the world’s strongest brands—how companies create these brands and how they outperform. We call these Go-to Brands. The key finding from our latest study shows that Go-to Brands aren’t built only from a customer-facing perspective. Rather, they’re built through engaged, motivated employees who understand the company’s brand, feel that they’re a critical part of the brand’s purpose and proactively deliver it to customers.  

Companies that get this right not only have a more fulfilled, energized workforce but also dramatically outperform the competition in terms of growth and resilience. They have greater employee retention and a more cohesive alignment around their brand, which informs every decision by every employee.  

Even better, these companies outperform in financial terms. Yet, only one in four companies succeed—with those that do seeing year-over-year revenue growth 25% higher than the median. (See the “Methodology” sidebar for more details on our survey and terminology.) 

If you’re looking only at consumers when building or activating your brand, you’re doing it wrong. That has always been true; but it’s particularly true today, given the current shifts in individual priorities that accelerated during the pandemic. The rules are being rewritten in terms of what we expect from employees as they deliver for customers and, most notably, what employees expect from us as we help them do so. 

Our research also highlights how to apply this approach at your company, including specific steps that you can take to understand your employees and proactively engage them around your brand so that they can serve and delight your customers. It’s not an easy transition—among other things, it requires CMOs to think more like HR leaders and CHROs to think more like marketers—but it’s eminently possible. In fact, to build a Go-to Brand, it’s imperative. 

A company’s employees are also an audience for the brand; and, at a certain level, they require the same two elements of connection and progress. From an employee perspective, however, these elements are similar in principle but different in application. They’re focused internally rather than externally.   

Connection

The love that employees have for their organization. Employees feel connected to an employer that inspires and appreciates them, offers products and services that they believe in, recognizes them for their work and cares for them as individuals.  

Progress

The ability to achieve things you otherwise couldn’t because you work at your organization. Companies create progress for employees by giving them a sense that they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Progress also entails giving employees the flexibility and encouragement to thrive and perform at work, so employees have the support needed to bring out their best.  

Both connection and progress are crucial in today’s war for talent, especially given shifts in individual priorities that accelerated during the pandemic.

Sure, that means providing employees with more flexibility for working in new ways and places. Still, more fundamentally, it means inspiring and appreciating employees (creating connection) and helping them thrive (supporting progress). It means treating them as critical stakeholders of the brand.  

But employees aren’t just an audience for the brand—they are also the brand’s most important deliverer. And for employees to deliver a brand externally to customers, there’s an important third element.    

Enablement

Feeling empowered to act in support of your organization’s mission and values. Enablement means treating employees not just as any other stakeholder of the brand but, rather, equipping them to act in support of the brand. Enablement is only possible alongside connection and progress: when employees feel supported and appreciated; when they take pride in the company’s mission and what’s in it for them; and when they have the tools, processes and incentives to deliver on the brand.  

Connection and progress create a positive relationship and foundation for enablement—the real “unlock” in creating Go-to Brands. Enablement is a means of harnessing the energy and passion of every employee and aligning that in support of the brand in everything they do, every day. Without this kind of alignment, which is especially hard to achieve in today’s hybrid/remote working environment, employees work at cross-purposes—and the organization becomes unmovable. When companies provide connection, progress and enablement to their employees, though, the brand becomes unstoppable.  

They’re more energized and willing to go the extra mile. In our analysis, employees at the companies with the strongest performance in all three areas were 28 percentage points more willing to go above and beyond in their work.

They make better decisions. Because these employees understand the brand, they can take actions in their day-to-day work to support it, reducing the need for command-and-control management.

They move faster and innovate to improve the customer experience. Because they often see that experience in highly tangible, rubber-meets-the-road ways, they have a firsthand view of customer pain points and challenges and can propose and implement solutions for improvement.

They stay. These employees tend to have longer tenures at a company—a 27 percentage point improvement in stated intent to remain at the company. That leads to advantages not only in labor costs but also in fostering a cohesive company culture that perseveres over time. 

This idea has major implications for CMOs. In an era of radical transparency, where all aspects of the customer experience need to live up to the brand’s purpose and commitments, we can’t afford to leave out employees in creating that robust and aligned customer experience. Walking the walk must happen both internally and externally. When CMOs take on increasing responsibility not just for the brand but also to build the business holistically, they need everyone to believe in the purpose and where the organization is heading, to see the value of it in their own work, and how each person is a part of getting there—whether they directly engage customers, or work behind the scenes in operations or technology. In other words, they need to start focusing internally rather than just externally and treating employees as a core stakeholder of the brand.

Companies have all gone through multiple transformations over the past decade, and there’s a real risk of initiative-fatigue among employees. The default among many workforces is to say that this is just one more initiative; wait a few months for it to blow over, and we can all get back to the old way of working. But the stakes of brand transformation could not be higher. Get the vision wrong—or fail to deliver it in a consistent, authentic way—and you’ll lose both your customers and your employees forever.  

For that reason, the activation of any effort is crucial. From our experience working with companies, five principles will boost the odds of success.

The entire C-suite needs to be fully on board, clear on the overall vision and committed to making change an enterprise-wide priority—not just for change’s sake but, rather, to acknowledge employee engagement and brand delivery as integrally linked and critical to driving their own business and strategic vision. To convince skeptics that the program is real, leaders need to send early, powerful and meaningful signals. How? Commit the required resources in terms of time, capital and talent; be highly visible and public about the initiative in order to build momentum and excitement; and be open and thoughtful about new ways of working, for themselves and for their teams, in order to fully support a branded experience both inside and out. It’s also critical for these behaviors to be sustained, not just delivered for a single campaign cycle. 

When CVS Health communicated its vision as a consumer health company, it very publicly announced that it would stop selling tobacco products in all 7,600 stores. A single decision forfeited $2 billion in revenue, but that near-term revenue hit effectively signaled—to its customers, its 200,000 employees, and its 26,000 pharmacists and nurse practitioners—that CVS had a long-term commitment to help people on their path to better health. And according to recent analysis from the American Journal of Public Health, the decision contributed to a drop in tobacco purchases for all retailers. In short, cigarette smokers stopped buying elsewhere, too, clearly delivering on the company’s higher purpose. 

Not only did CVS’s bold statement serve a broader public good, but also it reaffirmed CVS Health’s helm as the U.S.’s leading pharmacy. The decline in front stores sales was massively eclipsed by pharmacy services revenue growth, which increased by 15% per annum in the following five years. Furthermore, CVS received a litany of praise from health organizations – even then President Barack Obama – and likelihood to shop at CVS increased over 40% on a relative basis.  

What bold moves can you make to signal leadership’s commitment to a higher purpose?

If living the brand is reserved for the executive suite, without the support and engagement of employees, the effort won’t make an impact or drive real change. Employees will simply shrug it off. Instead, you need to build the program to drive grassroots ownership and immersion. As early as possible, enlist all employees in the transformation and give them a real voice in designing changes. Promote and celebrate early successes—specific contributions that lead to significant improvements. And empower people to voice concerns or make suggestions for improvement at all stages of the transformation.  

When Hawaiian Airlines wanted to refresh its brand, they didn’t confine the project to the C-suite. Representatives of the company’s 6,500 employees—from pilots to aircraft mechanics to guest-service agents—provided input as to what makes the company so special, which values they needed to celebrate and which visuals meant the most to them. The result: a brand that amplifies the proud island heritage and elevates the warmth, care and generosity that are hallmarks of Hawaiian hospitality. In short, “Aloha in everything we do.” The employees helped launch the refreshed brand at a company-wide event with the CEO. They also took center stage in a public-facing video announcing the refreshed logo, telling their stories and reinvigorating connection to the brand.   

How can you ensure your employees are central to every stage of building a better brand?

Brand connection with customers lives or dies depending on how the experience makes them feel. The same principle is true for employees. All efforts need to work on a rational level and—even more importantly—on an emotional level, capturing employees’ hearts and spirits to build dedication and pride in the organization and where it’s going. The experiences and communications need to be crafted carefully to align with the existing culture at the organization. (What works for a legacy B2B manufacturer, for instance, won’t work for a young retail brand.) Employees are highly attuned to inauthentic gestures; if the gesture is not genuine, they won’t buy in and won’t actively contribute.  

When DuPont spun off on its own, the company needed to retain the best of its 200+-year heritage while also signaling a future-forward vision. Creating a strong sense of shared purpose among employees was essential to building momentum toward a dynamic brand that stood for customer-centricity, collaboration and transformative innovation. How did DuPont ensure that every employee felt a part of this inspiring future? During the launch, in addition to large, inspiring colleague events that included stories of how the businesses meaningfully deliver on the purpose, DuPont created a sense of shared identity in which all employees could see their role as “Makers of New.” Even little things, like revamped nametags that encouraged employees to fill in the blank (“Maker of _______”), not only brought the new brand to life but also made every employee feel part of an inspiring future. 

Success requires that broad, abstract concepts get translated into very tangible changes in an employee’s day-to-day work—in two ways. The first way is in value to employees through initiatives like aligned rewards and incentives or a set of brand-aligned professional development opportunities that reach beyond their stated role in the organization. The second way is in supporting employees as they make the brand real for customers, which means giving employees an intuitive sense of what’s now required, clear guidance and a clear payoff for getting it right.  

Hawaiian Airlines didn’t stop at celebrating its new brand. Employee ambassadors led interactive training across the organization on how to “connect people with aloha” and bring the values of care, hospitality, collaboration and excellence to life. Training sessions used real-world scenarios to answer critical questions: What is my role? What experience am I supposed to create for our guests? What am I supposed to do differently?  After catalyzing action with interactive training, employees focused on bringing the brand to life; a “values journal” and a new “pride pin” helped build employee appreciation. Making it real for every individual helped inspire connection, progress and enablement in a way that is authentically and uniquely Hawaiian. 

Lastly, successful brands need to be embedded into the organization culture through important moments, both formal and informal, in the employee journey. The goal is to build a shared set of norms, practices and even rituals that include all employees and reinforce the brand’s key attributes.  

Regardless of whether you’re at the start of a journey to transform your brand or you’re making progress on a new brand direction and are ready to more fully realize it from within your organization, a quick quantitative assessment can identify your strengths and gaps—arming you with insights to inform the work that you already do as a brand and as a business in order to recruit, engage and train your people.  

Your perceptions are a good place to start.

Our quick qualitative assessment can show you where yours stand.