Brand Strategy and Its Importance in Keeping Employees Happy ~ with Kevin Walker

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An interview with Kevin Walker on Brand Strategy and its role in keeping employees happy.

Kevin Walker (Boardwalk) speaks with Geoff Johansing about the importance of a brand and how managing your brand effectively will be as attractive to your best employee as it is to your best customer. A good brand strategy will be pointing to a healthy corporate culture, meaningful work, high-quality co-workers; and attract the very best candidates, and keep them happy. Everybody wants to work for a good brand. If a company differentiates its brand assets in a meaningful way they will find their true competitive advantage, tell their story, and grow their business.

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FULL TRANSCRIPTION:

GEOFF JOHANSING: Hello everyone. I’m Geoff Johansing. I run the Pasadena office of Insurance Office of America. I am a property and casualty insurance agent working on companies in the middle market arena from a hundred plus employees with ten million plus in revenue and my focus is to have all of my clients have happy employees. I’m here today with Kevin Walker, who runs Boardwalks Branding, and he’s in the Los Angeles area. Welcome, Kevin.

KEVIN WALKER: Thank you.

GJ: You want to tell us a little bit about your company?

KW: Ah, sure. Boardwalk is brand strategy consultancy. We are here in Los Angeles, and have been in business since 1990. We work in all different industries; technology, healthcare, financial services, consumer products, sports, entertainment, municipalities, nonprofits, pretty much everything… and what we do with our clients is we help them differentiate their brand assets and in a meaningful way, find their true competitive advantage, tell their story and grow their business.

GJ: Wonderful. So Kevin, my first question; how does having a strong brand create happy employees?

KW: Well studies show that the top concern of middle market companies is talent. How does an organization attract the best, most capable and most productive employees and then keep the competition from poaching them? In the past, they’ve only had to worry themselves about two different things; base pay salary structure and benefits package.

GJ: Right.

KW: But now, every job offer has that. And top talent, in fact, will expect offers at the high end of that scale. So if every job offer is, if there’s parody in all the job offers, how does a candidate make a decision? And they look at four different things; they look at the purpose and the mission at the prospective company; they look at the meaningfulness of the work there; they look at the quality of the co-workers; and they look at the corporate culture. And if you notice, all those things are branding issues. And in fact, 50% of job candidates who turn down a job offer… do it because they don’t like the offering company’s brand.

GJ: Okay.

KW: But if you’ve been managing your brand effectively it will already be as attractive to your best employee as it is to your best customer. A good brand strategy will be pointing to healthy corporate culture, meaningful work, high-quality co-workers; and you’ll be in good shape to attract the very best candidates, and keep them happy. Everybody wants to work for a good brand.

GJ: Right.

KW: And a strong brand.

GJ: And I know you and I have spoken before on this issue, and you brought up also that there’s a fair amount of people that are leaving because maybe they took the job because nothing else was available and…

KW: It’s true. I read one study that said 51% of people who are in a job, are actively looking for a better situation. Now, how active they are? I’m not sure. I mean, it could be some of these very actively looking for another job and has his resume going out everywhere or somebody’s just keeping a weather eye out for a better opportunity.

GJ: That’s a big number. That is a very big number. Recruiting is really expensive. Is that employment value proposition different from my customer facing value proposition? And if so, aren’t we now doubling our marketing efforts and budget?

KW: Actually, on the contrary. You’ll be saving money both in your marketing side and your Human Resources with a strong brand. Again, the same brand strategy that attracts your best customer will also attract your best employee.

Take, for example, a company like Tom’s Shoes. They have a very unique, out of the ordinary, altruistic brand promise; and that attracts a certain kind of customer. But it also attracts a certain kind of employee, who’s interested in that kind of altruistic outlook or altruistic business model if you will. So the employee or Tom, if there is a Tom, the employee and the customer all share this value system that makes them all work well together in their brand. And while that might be an extreme example; this kind of “tribalism” exists everywhere, where people just feel attracted and comfortable with a brand that they whose values they share.

GJ: Mm-hmm.

KW: And that’s true in b2b and in the services sectors, as well as in consumer products.

GJ: I know that Tom’s Shoes buy one, give one, type thing.

KW: Right. Right.

GJ: You buy a pair of shoes, and then they give one to someone in need in a third world country or this or….

KW: Right. And Warby Parker’s the same thing. But again, that’s kind of an extreme example but it makes the point. But every company, every business out there, every product, every service, anything that needs to be marketed, should have a brand strategy. And it should focus on a unique brand promise, like that.

GJ: Got it. So I get how a brand can lower marketing costs through consistency, and increased awareness, but you also claim a strong brand lowers costs in human resources. How is that so?

KW: As an example, we had a client, Trillium, and they were developers of protocol software. Right from the get-go our strategy for them was to position them as the gold standard in that sector. And as that brand was starting to take shape, a funny thing started to happen. They started getting resumes from all over the world. All the best protocols software engineers in the world recognized Trillium as being THE place, the leader in that market, and that’s where they wanted to work.

So from there on, Trillium had very little in the way of recruiting costs, because they were… all the best people were coming to them. And also their training costs went way down because these people are already the best protocol software minds in the world, and they just didn’t need that much training.

GJ: The training will go down also because the retention is high.

KW: Retention is higher, yes, because they’re working for a brand that they want to work for.

GJ: So the 51% that we talked about earlier, that are actively looking, are not at this company.

KW: Well, hopefully not.

GJ: But most likely because…

KW: Right… right.

GJ: Next question. What if you’re talking about branding a product? How does an employee value proposition fit in there?

KW: Well, you have two scenarios there. You can either be a house of brands or a branded house. A branded house would be a company like Nike, where everything they do fits under the Nike banner. Any new product that they might develop, as long as it’s… you know an authentic part of their current portfolio, their Nike brand strategy is going to work to attract and retain the right kind of employee.  

GJ: Okay.

KW: Ah, flip side of that is “house of brands”. And that would be something like Procter & Gamble. The P&G brand itself is almost invisible. All their marketing efforts goes into their individual products; which are individual business units that they can buy and sell.

GJ: Okay

KW: In that case, each one of those products, like Tide or whatever, would develop its own brand strategy that would attract its own dedicated employee, and its own devoted customer. So in either case, this works out well to attract the right kind of employees.

GJ: Okay, because they’re working for this specific division and you said…

KW: Right… right…

GJ: Okay. So another question. How can a business, that hasn’t given much thought to this sort of a thing, begin to build a brand strategy that will attract happy customers and employees?

KW: Well, there’s an art and a science to branding. And some people like Steve Jobs, and Phil Knight, at Nike, and Richard Branson, they sort of have an innate knack for the art side of it. They kinda get it. And if that’s you, great. But… you would still do yourself a favor to consult with a branding agency to take you through the science side of it because there is a method to discovering what your brand promise ought to be.

In the end, a brand strategy is making a business case for why a brand asset should be positioned in a certain way, in order to gain competitive advantage over the rest of the market. And there’s a process to arriving at that conclusion. And your best bet is to go with a branding consultancy, like Boardwalk, but there are also ad agencies and PR firms that can do a pretty good job of it too.

GJ: And then pulling that branding into the employee happiness, it’s again, like we talked about in the beginning, it’s everyone’s on the same page, believes in the mission etc., sort of thing.

KW: Absolutely. Absolutely. When we put brand strategies together for larger companies we want to make sure that there’s a representative of like the rank-and-file employees.

GJ: Ok.

KW: Who’s part of the approval committee along with the CEO and perhaps their marketing people. We want a trusted employee to be part of that determination so that that person can report back to the rest of the staff what’s going on, why we’re doing what we’re doing, and then when we come out with the final brand strategy, there’s some employee buy-in to that…

GJ: Right.

KW: …at least at a certain level. And it makes it easier for everybody to get on board and start rolling in the same direction.

GJ: How long does the process of doing this branding for a company take; if you’ve got a company that let’s say have been around five years in a newer space, is there a guideline that you would use?

KW: It really kind of depends on the size of the company and the number of different… the number of different things they’re working on. I talked to a nonprofit recently that has about a dozen different major programs, and each one of those has to probably be branded itself, and then it would take it quite a while to do it. But typically my clients tend to.. tends to be like anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months to get through the brand strategy part of it. Then what comes out of the strategy, now you have to look at all of your marketing communication and say well, “does what we’ve been doing… does that fit with our new brand strategy?” “Does our logo communicate what we need it to communicate?” And if doesn’t then you need to, you know, probably update your logo. Ah, websites, alright, you know, so that could be another six months to a year.

KW: It really kind of depends on the size of the company and the number of different… the number of different things they’re working on. I talked to a nonprofit recently that has about a dozen different major programs, and each one of those has to probably be branded itself, and then it would take it quite a while to do it. But typically my clients tend to.. tends to be like anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months to get through the brand strategy part of it. Then what comes out of the strategy, now you have to look at all of your marketing communication and say well, “does what we’ve been doing… does that fit with our new brand strategy?” “Does our logo communicate what we need it to communicate?” And if doesn’t then you need to, you know, probably update your logo. Ah, websites, alright, you know, so that could be another six months to a year.

GJ: To get all that stuff… So can you tell me an example of a company that you took through this process and what the end result was?

KW: Yeah, well we could talk about Trillium. We started with Trillium. There were three software engineers sitting around a kitchen table. They didn’t even have an office. Their issue was they felt strongly that their solutions, their software solutions were far superior to the rest of the competition, but they couldn’t seem to like, sell it. So we went with them to a trade show, because that’s where all the trade shows, I’m sorry, that’s where all their business happened was at trade shows. And we could see the issue right away. They had a tiny little 10 foot by 10 foot booth at the back of the convention hall with the black curtain behind him. And the little table in front with a black curtain around that, skirting it, and then, the little generic sign, you know a cardboard sign, you know, tied by wire up to the top of the curtain. And all their competitors were exactly the same.

GJ: Oh.

KW: And all the software engineers who were manning all these booths all had that universal software engineering…

GJ: Engineers….

KW: …you know, old jeans, ironic t-shirt and ratty sneaks. And so we said “Okay. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna help you here, but you’re not gonna like some of the things we ask you to do. The first thing we had to do is get a 20 by 20 foot booth. Then we designed a corporate identity for them that looked like it belonged up there with their customers, which at the time we’re like Nokia, Motorola, General Electric…

GJ: Some big companies…

KW: Big companies. Yeah, and you know, they needed to look like they belonged in that club. And we created a trade show booth for them. We redid all their marketing materials. And then at the next trade show… the doors open, the buyers come in, and they went to our client’s booth first. Oh, the other thing that they didn’t want to do, that we made them do, is wear khakis, and we had a polo shirt made with their logo on it. It made them look professional, which made the buyers feel more comfortable with them. So the buyers went to their booth first and stayed there longer. Protocol software is a tough sale. It takes some time to explain it. And so they had that time with the buyers. Then the buyers went to the other booths and pretty much they were already sold on our clients. So within about five years, they were the market leader.

GJ: Okay

KW: Within about ten years they had hardly any competition left. And then after fifteen years, we lost them as a client because they were bought by Intel.

GJ: Oh wow, okay.

KW: So, it works. And that’s a B2B situation. B2C is a… well, it’s the same story, but it’s… B2C companies seem to know that they need branding.

GJ: Tell me about your favorite B2C success story.

KW: We did a program for Honda Racing.

GJ: okay.

KW: Motorcycle racing…

GJ: okay

KW: And that was… had some tough technical issues, because we actually had two different clients. We had Honda Racing and we also had NBC/Universal.

GJ: Okay.

KW: I was doing a licensing program for them, so we had to serve two different masters here, who’s uh priorities weren’t always in alignment.

GJ: Okay.

KW: Add to that, what we’re doing… a program that has individual racers involved… Individual racers who wear uniforms that have a million different logos on them. And then some of those companies were not on board with the program.

GJ: Okay.

KW: So all the logos had to be photoshopped out, so that took some time too. But I was very happy with it, that we ended up doing two programs, a mass market program, and a specialty market program. That satisfied two different customers and everybody was happy. So I was really, really, thrilled with that.

GJ: And what about a good example of a branding experience you had where it really did.. you could see the light go on in the employees… like I get it! I get what this is doing for us as a company.

KW: You know I think I would go back to Trillium again. Okay, because software engineers can be pretty skeptical people.

GJ: Okay.

KW: About anything marketing. But when they saw it happening they really were on board.

GJ: Okay.

KW: And they appreciated the work.

GJ: All right. Well, everyone again, I’m Geoff Johansen. This is another video for our Happy Employees series, and I am with Kevin Walker of Boardwalk.