Every employee is a brand ambassador

In the stores of certain luxury brands, people with normal incomes are treated badly, which contradicts a good customer experience - and is used very consciously to cultivate the brand image," explains Lukas Widmer, Brand Manager at Swisscom. Behavioral branding aims to influence employee behavior and use it as a contribution to brand management. After all, brands are not only built and maintained through marketing communication, but also through the behavior and personal communication of employees, among other things. Successful behavioral branding makes a decisive contribution to increasing the value of a brand. Unlike a luxury brand, the telecommunications provider Swisscom aims to create good customer experiences for broad customer groups. But the experiences in a Swisscom store are also brand-specific, Widmer emphasizes. They are specifically geared to all or at least one of the three brand attributes "trustworthy, inspiring and simple ". The attribute trustworthy is made tangible in the store, for example, by allowing the employee to look at the customer's screen when processing their data. For contact points from home visits to trade fairs, Swisscom consciously implements the brand attributes and takes employee behavior into account, along with other components. The topic of employee activation has gained a lot of attention from experts and scientists in recent years. In practice, however, behavioral branding is still far from being implemented consistently everywhere. Many companies do not even rate the topic as particularly important. Only about half state that employees play a role in their brand management - slightly more have recognized the importance, but have not yet taken any measures. And in only one in ten companies does brand management closely coordinate with HR. A consistent brand experience across all channels is now seen by the majority of companies as a key challenge in the area of brand management - and employees in particular play a key role in this, because they are often the primary points of contact with a brand.

Not just targeting the buyer

Brand-compliant behavior is scrutinized particularly closely where direct customer contact takes place. Swisscom also evaluates specific contact points as part of its regular brand image measurements. "First we look at how the customer behaved on the journey through the store. Then we ask ourselves whether that corresponds to what we want to say with the brand and where we might need to make the brand a little more visible." The weighting of the brand attributes is implemented differently for each point of contact. "Trustworthiness, for example, is very important when a technician visits customers at home. At a trade show, inspiration can be more prominent - you're more likely to highlight new products there." But you're not only a brand ambassador when you're dealing directly with customers - "but also, for example, in contact with family, friends and acquaintances - or, as in my case, with agencies," Widmer says. Behavioral branding can even be seen as one aspect of the tendency for brand managers to no longer focus directly on the potential buyer. Brand strategy is formulated with the interests of current or potential employees, investors, suppliers and society as a whole in mind. The focus is on building long-term relationships through identification with the brand. A brand can only achieve this by establishing a clear image in the minds of all internal and external target groups. When Swisscom introduced a new design in 2008, the company therefore also took into account the behavior of all employees and management as part of the uniform "One Swisscom" brand positioning. This was done on two levels: First, explicitly via a clearly formulated mission statement, which was adapted to the new strategy. It includes the promise to be the best companion for customers in a networked world. A tool was introduced for managers to help create the right framework for implementing this promise. On the other hand, the implicit communication of the Swisscom spirit plays an important role, from the Swisscom Games held every two years to the architecture. "At first glance, it may not always be obvious what this has to do with branding. But all of these activities convey important components of the Swisscom spirit. They just don't come across as 'in your face'."

Just not too many dry specifications

UBS does not have any employee conduct guides, denies Johan Jervoe, Group Chief Marketing Officer. "I personally believe that you don't succeed in the medium or long term with such dry guidelines. Customer orientation comes about on its own when people enjoy going to work, find themselves in a brand and are proud of it." That's why UBS wants to attract a certain type of employee above all. In addition, he says, the company is very interested in employee motivation, whether employees feel good at work and what can be done to increase satisfaction. Jervoe is convinced that employee behavior plays a key role for the brand. But just as critical, he says, is how the brand behaves and how that affects the employee. "Behavioral branding is too simple a word for me as someone who helps design brands: to me, it falls short of ensuring that employees enjoy going to work and are motivated to work with colleagues, subject areas and customers. They can only make a brand tangible by working quite consistently to ensure that the brand is also worn." Making the brand tangible is projected into trainings, but not treated as a special chapter. Jervoe clearly distances himself from the idea of an instruction manual.

From horror stories to redesign

Under the motto "We surpr!se", the Swiss automobile dealership group AMAG has trained its employees in recent years and committed them to positive customer surprise both externally and internally. "But you can't put 5400 employees on the same page - we want to introduce them to the topic of service orientation and let an ongoing discourse develop," emphasizes Dino Graf, Head of Corporate Communication and responsible for the behavioral branding campaign that AMAG launched in 2012. The way in which a customer can be surprised with a small gesture always depends on the situation and is individual. If it's raining, you might accompany them to the car with an umbrella. On a hot day, they are more likely to be pleased to find a cool bottle of water in the car. In addition to the involvement of management, it is therefore also crucial that employees help shape this process. In one-day workshops, the campaign first got the management on board. Woke up at the beginning with the facts: Customer expectations or how drastically self-image and external image differ. Participants then had to work out how service could be changed in specific situations, based on horror and hero stories presented. The managers repeated the same workshops with their teams in a next step. "The system/process doesn't allow it," was no longer accepted as an excuse in real customer conversations afterwards. "It is obvious to hide behind processes and systems. That's why we introduced the so-called joker card. If you have this carte blanche, you are officially allowed to disregard a process for the benefit of a customer. It was used almost too little, although it was allowed to be used without restriction," says Graf. A brand promise is only credible if it is lived internally. The company followed this textbook path from internal brand understanding to the new corporate design: the large-scale behavioral branding campaign first clearly had friendly customer service in mind. Because "the experiences in the garages still had potential toward the top," as Graf puts it. "We started with the behavioral branding program and then, in the course of that, asked ourselves what the AMAG brand stood for, what we wanted to achieve in the future and how we wanted to be perceived. That led to us also changing our overall appearance last year." This overhaul of the appearance has since been completed. Working with employees, on the other hand, is a "never-ending story."

Simone Isliker

"Brand-compliant employee behavior should be developed together with employees"

WW: The term Behavioral Branding was invented at the University of St. Gallen. What did you miss about the term Internal Branding?
Sven Henkel: "Behavioral" was very en vogue in terms of the term. Behavioral economics was just coming up at the time. The term brings the aspect of behavior to the fore. Internal branding was very much focused inward: it was about how to use the brand to bind employees to the company. Behavioral branding aims to align the employee's behavior externally with the brand. Ultimately, the addressee is not the employee, but the customer.

Only half of the companies state that employees play a role in their brand management. Why do many companies not practice behavioral branding, even though the topic has been getting a lot of attention in theory for several years?
On the one hand, many industrial companies have not yet discovered the topic of branding and tend to focus on sales training. On the other hand, the topic must at least be supported by the board or management, because it entails a cultural change. Short-term goal-setting systems mean that behavioral branding is not pursued sustainably in many companies. That's a shame, because those who do it are definitely more successful.

One also often hears the objection that dictatorial guidelines are counterproductive and that employees who are controlled by others quickly feel demotivated.
Yes, I know these reservations. The uniformity of employees resonates. The Behavioral Branding Funnel of the University of St. Gallen contains three conditions for brand-compliant behavior: knowing, wanting and being able. First, the employee must know what the brand stands for; second, he or she must have a commitment to the brand; and third, he or she must be able to communicate the brand in interactions with customers. The wanting component makes it clear that employees should be empowered and motivated. They should work on the big topic of the brand of their own free will.

In many cases, employees are nevertheless given very specific instructions on how to behave at individual touchpoints in order to present the brand attributes.
That's right. We have learned that an employee needs 95 percent routine processes to be efficient enough to have time for the moment of specialness. The more action alternatives an employer presents, the better the employee can form routines and thus has the opportunity to react very emphatically in between, for example. In addition, the level of training plays an important role. The lower it is, the more likely someone is to simply want to know what to do. The better the training, the more varied the professional context. Then you can no longer work with process specifications. It is important that a company involves every employee in development. He absolutely has to realize that he is not part of a top-down process.

Can problems also arise from the high expectation that all employees must identify with the brand?
The strongest Swiss brand in terms of brand behavior is probably Hilti. They have such a clear culture that there are only people who are either fans or enemies. Anyone who doesn't feel comfortable there leaves immediately. But that's also important, because a brand has to polarize. Marking simply means: some people like it, others don't. In the best case, the employees are already enthusiastic about the brand from the outset. There are about 40 percent in every company who do what's right anyway. When I work for an airline, I usually enjoy traveling and am service-oriented. In addition, there are employees who neither know nor want to. Most of the time, they are happy to be transferred to less contact-intensive positions. As a company, you can live with the fact that some employees are neutral. More importantly, I have few employees who work against me.

You have announced a practical book on the subject. What current research findings or new topics will be included in the publication?
We are currently investigating the influence of external communication on employees. We will probably also look at tools such as scenario techniques and storytelling. We now know quite a bit about scenic learning, for example in theater workshops. All of these tools are designed to motivate employees to enjoy engaging with the brand. Moving away from "one explained" to interactive "develop together ". Gamification approaches work very well because part of our deepest needs is to learn through play.

Interview: Simone Isliker