Marketing and HR: Essential Partners for the Branded Experience

13 April 2005—In a world of services and solutions, customer experience becomes a critical arena for brand differentiation. Customers have more information at their fingertips and endless choices of providers. They want to be treated as individuals and they want excellent service. If they don’t receive it, they go elsewhere to find it. Thus loyalty in both the business and consumer worlds is built by delivering a consistent, valuable, and differentiated experience for the customer.

Operations and delivery organizations are the obvious providers of customer experience, but it is equally important to focus on the relationship between marketing and human resources (HR). When these organizations fail to collaborate effectively, a company can spend millions on developing, promoting, and advertising an external brand that is not understood or supported by the employees. The best scenario here is missed opportunities to reinforce your brand through your employees. The worst case is employee attitudes and behaviors that conflict directly with the external messages and promises.

Building and sustaining a branded experience requires marketing to work with HR at almost every level. First, does HR have in place the right people and practices to truly support what the brand is aiming to achieve in the marketplace? Are processes in place to recruit the types of people who most “fit” with your brand? Does your new employee orientation program introduce the brand culture from day one? Does your delivery style reinforce your brand promise? A company with a brand essence of “safety first,” for example, should recruit and train employees in a very different way than one with a brand essence of “innovate and inspire.”

Further, marketers should look at other traditional HR practices, such as leadership development, performance management, compensation, and benefits, to ensure that they all strongly support the key brand drivers. Implementing marketing expertise, HR can begin to develop very different and much more brand-focused employee programs.

In the past, marketers believed that their realm was defined by such concepts as positioning, distribution, pricing policy, product presentation, and communication—and not by employee performance. The idea was that marketers would communicate the brand promise to customers and they would, in a Pavlovian way, react.

The reality, of course, is that more and more brands falter because they fail to deliver an adequate experience against the promise. Indeed, one bad customer experience can wipe out millions of advertising expenditures. Customers share bad experiences with others far more frequently than they do good ones.

Marketers typically emphasize such controllable metrics as awareness, consideration, and preference. But what really matters for long-term brand strength is the customer experience—determined by the direct actions of employees.

Working together, marketing and HR can create a powerful engine to deliver the branded experience. Together, they can mobilize thousands or even tens of thousands of “brand ambassadors” across the company rather than the few who sit in the marketing department. But making this goal a reality means recruiting the people who fit your brand and organizing the right internal messages, training, and practices to ensure that your employees both understand and live the brand.

Richard Branson credits his company’s success neither to following the pack nor to adopting best practices but rather to adopting uncommon practice: “Virgin loves to, we all love to, take industries and shake them up and make sure they’re never the same again. We’ve done it to the airline industry, we’ve done it to the financial services industry, and we will do it to the rail industry.”

Who will do it to the technology industry?

—Jacqueline Moyse, an ITSMA consulting partner, specializes in HR development and internal branding. She can be reached at jacqueline_moyse@hotmail.com.

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About ITSMA
ITSMA specializes in helping companies market and sell services and solutions more effectively. As a membership organization, we provide research, consulting, and training to the world's leading technology, communications, and professional services providers to generate increased demand, strengthen customer relationships, and improve brand differentiation. ITSMA is based near Boston, and has offices in London and Tokyo. Learn more at www.itsma.com.