Most people think of brands as being created through marketing, advertising, and interesting ads and powerful messages. But successful branding goes much deeper than just creating what customers see and hear in the media. Think of an iceberg: The majority of it is always underwater. Marketing and advertising are like the part of the iceberg that you can see above the water. Marketing and advertising can communicate your brand promise to customers, but they are only promises. Real experiences deliver the brand promise. This communication has the potential to be much more engaging than you might think.
To drive brand growth, employees and team members need to understand the brand promise, before communicating it to the brand’s customers, they can communicate the brand promise from different angles depending on their position and the job they undertake. By training employees and team members, you are empowering them and the brand to act, by creating excitement for them, rather than obligations and responsibilities in the job.
You often hear the refrain: “Our employees are our greatest asset.” Unfortunately, most companies fail to provide their employees with a clear, specific understanding of the value their brand brings to customers, and they fail. Create action plans and make branding a part of everyone’s job.
Why spend resources on this?
It's simple, a recent study found that stocks of "brand leaders"—companies with high brand awareness and a very high percentage of employees aligned with the brand promise—outperformed the S&P 500 by 300% and nearly doubled those of companies with high brand awareness alone.
The following process has been proven effective for many different brands and organizations:
Step 1: Brand Content Focused Workshops

The business needs to focus on the top 3 or 4 attributes that your brand represents in the marketplace, and the company leaders should always keep a close eye on this. Workshops are designed to build understanding around perceptions of differentiation, beliefs and other values about the brand. Certainly brands should do this, but in some cases this step can be skipped.
Step 2: Increase planning meetings
With the characteristics identified and agreed upon above. The next step is to conduct meetings to plan for the brand. You must realize that each brand is different, depending on the customer, market, organizational structure, culture, etc. You need to clearly identify the main goals of the brand, from there build the structure of the plans, schedule the workshops, who will participate and the measurement standards specific to the brand.
Step 3: Enhance the workshops
Depending on the size of the organization, brands must control the content of all workshops, or train someone to do it for them. These include the fundamentals of branding, the nature of the brand promise, the elements the brand is trying to establish, and the benefits of motivating employees to live the brand. This also involves building a brand mindset for employees, helping them become aware of the methods, processes, and behaviors within their area of responsibility. This will help the business communicate the brand promise and brand-related content.
Step 4: Implementation
Following the scope of work, the business needs to review the ideas, action plans that have been developed, and changes that have been identified in the scope of work. Next, the decisions that have been made regarding the organization of implementation and the goals that have been determined for each plan. The ideas and changes that have been identified need to be reviewed to see which ones have the greatest impact on costs.
Step 5: Evaluation
The question is what needs to be measured. Work with the appropriate members of your branding team. Brands need to be clear about: How best to measure the impact of changes and how to find the reasons for the success of these ideas and changes.
The best way to change people’s actions is to involve them. Let them live the brand promise and brand perceptions. Every employee must understand how it affects the success of the brand and themselves, and why. Let them come up with creative ideas, test them, and take actions that support the brand’s growth. The result of all this activity will be an army of brand promise evangelists, an army that is much larger and more effective than marketing and advertising.
According to Nhut Linh – Lantabrand