Business, Brand and Employer Brand Alignment

What is it and why is it important?

Alignment sits at the heart of our offer, not as a strait jacket but as a guiding light to enable and empower the organisation and all its people, brands and businesses to be perceived and experienced as one.   

All too often the value of people, brands and organisations is not realised because of lack of alignment between:

• The company’s and people’s purpose and values;
• Business, brand and employer brand strategies;
• Operational silos; and
• The promise the company is making to its employees, customers and stakeholders through its communications and their actual experiences.

There are eight key moments in time when it would be beneficial to think about your business-brand-employer-brand alignment:

• When you’re thinking about or have a just gone through a merger and acquisition or joint venture
• When you have a new business strategy and want to understand if and how well your customer, corporate and employer brands align to drive the business forward.
• Prior to revitalising the corporate, customer and/or employer brand positioning to inform the brief
• After revitalising the corporate, customer and/or employer brand positioning and you want to identify where it’s tracking well and where it could use some extra attention to maximise its effectiveness across the organisation
• When you’re about to start business and brand planning for the next period (annual or 3-year) and want to identify where you focus your resources to maximise your investment.
• When it becomes clear that your business is not consistently delivering against its promise to customers, employees and stakeholders (customer complaints, employee exits, investor divestment)
• When business results are struggling and/or research findings across the dashboard of brand tracking, corporate brand reputation, customer experience and employee experience are not telling the one story.
• When your sustainability strategy sits separately to the rest of the business, putting your business at risk of not delivering what stakeholders are demanding and/or green-blue-rainbow-woke washing!

How we go about it

We have a 12-question survey that we send out to clients covering all aspects of your business, brand/s and employer brand:

• Business strategy, model and commercial value proposition, annual and sustainability plan
• Key category/competitor insights, customer segmentation/profiles, brand positioning, marketing and customer experience plan
• Corporate brand/reputation communications
• Employer brand, employee segmentation and experience
• Commercial results and research findings from internal and external data, qualitative and quantitative, formal and anecdotal feedback, social listening, customer complaints, employee turnover etc
• Organisation structure and brand architecture
• Any internal hypotheses that need to be proven/disproven
• KPIs, approvals and hurdles, budget constraints for this project

We conduct an initial review of your response and information to check we understand the challenges and opportunities and follow up with a call with client team. During this conversation, we identify whether there is the need to collect any further information – either by our team or yours.

With the alignment assessment, we either do this as research and strategy desk work or interactive workshops with the client (one-day face-to-face or a series of 90-minute video conferences). This would include:

• Objectives
• Hypotheses
• Alignment of People, Brands & Business (4 Key Questions):
  • How aligned are the business, brand and employer brand strategies? Where are the challenges? What are the barriers to alignment?
  • How aligned are customers, employees and stakeholders to the purpose, values and positioning of the business, brand, employer brand? Where are the challenges? What are the barriers to alignment?
  • How aligned are the operational silos to the business, brand and employer brand strategies? Where are the challenges? What are the barriers to alignment?
  • How aligned is the promise the company is making to its employees, customers and stakeholders to actual communications and experiences? Where are the challenges? What are the barriers to alignment?
• Ideation:
  • Ideate the Bridges to overcome the Barriers
• Prioritisation:
  • Discuss and agree on Prioritisation Criteria/Weighting
  • Identify key opportunities

Post the assessment, we write up the output, add an external perspective on “how aligned are your people, brands and business” and any final recommendations.

Feel free to take a copy of the workshop outline with you and we’d love to help tailor this approach to your business: THBC BUSINESS BRAND ALIGNMENT WORKSHOP

Our experience in this area

Our managing director, Rachel Bevans, has prior experience on client-side with Westpac and consulting for WSP Engineering (Radley Yeldar) and Metro Trains (McCann) to gain alignment across the business, brands and employer brand; and for a distribution agreement joint venture, integrating the William Grant & Sons portfolio into Maxxium. 

Over the last nine years, we’ve helped CareFlight, Sumo Salad, Australian Fitness Network, Transport NSW Cyber Security Advisory; TAFE NSW Riverina (with The Hallway), Colonial First State Multi-Manager (with Cobe), Geoscience Australia and Norton Rose Fulbright (with Folk). 

How can we help you? 

You can download copy of the strategy brief here: THBC STRATEGY BRIEF