The Growing Importance of Internal Branding in Brand Positioning
By definition internal branding is a set of strategies and multi-disciplinary practices that empower and align the employees of any particular organization to consistently deliver exceptional quality customer experience. This is a process that also requires involvement of cross-functioning teams for program design as well as for implementation and institutionalization. Functioning as a bridge between development and implementation of business strategies internal branding strategy has become a key factor in brand success. Employees of an organization serve as an important component of the bridge that is internal branding and that makes it all the more essential to identify and better understand the drivers for employee engagement. Apart from development of different methodologies for generating sustainable initiatives for any specific internal branding strategy factors like pride and confidence of employees for the organization they are working for, recognition, rewards and consistency also play definitive roles in any internal branding process. In internal branding methodologies all initiatives spring from a set of brand associated values and many corporate organizations of international repute actually devote a lot of time and energy for developing as well as promulgating those values. As a matter of fact implementation of sustainable internal branding strategies and initiatives require involvement and application of a variety of techniques. Encouraging appropriate behavior among the employees is the key of successful implementation of internal branding strategies and human resource management is also found to play a strong part in its effective implementation. Under present conditions internal branding plays a more important role in successful implementation of result oriented brand building strategies. With little doubt it is the most powerful weapon for the companies for delivering superior brand experience through employee intermediation in effective brand promise delivery. This is perhaps the best way of successfully implementing and executing brand building and brand positioning strategies or if we put it more succinctly ignoring internal branding in brand building and positioning can most likely imperil a business. Considering the fact that the term ‘brand’ is now inclined more towards being considered as a concept for customer experience the role of the employees in delivering quality services has become more salient and also immutable. At a time when virtual communication technology is resulting in greater impediments to direct contact between a business organization and its customers any branding strategy might appear as counter intuitive. But there is also no denying the fact that this is getting exceedingly important for both the business organizations and the consumers. With its growing importance internal branding is no more restricted to business to customer interaction only and it has already proved itself equally relevant for the realm of inter-business interaction too. Effective brand building strategies those also include internal branding should make every single employee of the organization clearly understanding the brand promises and delivering accordingly. With proper and successful implementation of brand positioning and internal branding strategies it is really possible to create a bridge between development and execution of these strategies and from a human resource perspective employees of an organization are the most important component of that bridge.