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5 Ways to Turn Employees into Vocal Online Brand Advocates

employee-brand-advocatesA company’s employees are its most powerful brand advocates, but few companies know how to effectively empower their employees to advocate their brands. Learning how to do it should be a top priority for every company and brand, particularly for generating online brand advocacy where the reach and influence of your employees could be significant.

Of course, employees have to be happy and have to believe in the brand promise in order to want to advocate it to their own connections and online audiences. That’s where a company needs to start — with a focus on internal brand building.

Next, you need to give your employees the tools they need to advocate your brand in the ways you want them to. This is particularly important for workforces that are spread out in multiple locations. Using a tool like the employee advocacy software from Expion can help you manage the process, but you need to create your strategy and brand advocacy plan first.

You can’t expect your employees will know what to do. It’s up to you to guide them to advocate the brand properly. To help you get started, following are five ways you can turn your employees into vocal brand advocates online:

1. Give your employees the messages you want them to share.

What do you want your employees to say about your brand in their online conversations? What messages would make them proud to share information about their company and your brand? Can you give them messages that would be useful and meaningful to their friends, family, and online connections? Don’t assume they’ll relay every message you give them, and don’t give them sales-oriented messages. Very few employees will want to broadcast marketing and sales messages from their employer to their connections, but many will want to share useful information.

2. Give your employees the content you want them to talk about and share.

Beyond giving your employees messages, give them actual content to talk about and share online. This includes videos, infographics, images, slideshows, ebooks, and so on. This content should be meaningful, useful, or entertaining or none of your employees will share it. The goal for employee brand advocacy should be to build brand awareness across wider audiences that can lead to sales at a relatively low cost . With that in mind, keep self-promotion to a minimum. Focus on brand storytelling and tapping into emotions in your content, so people will want to share it.

3. Acknowledge your employees who actively advocate your brand online.

Don’t let your employees’ brand advocacy activities go unnoticed. Respond to them online. Acknowledge them offline as well. This acknowledgement should include company recognition and personal appreciation on a one-to-one basis. They’ll have more motivation to continue talking about your brand if they feel appreciated for their efforts.

4. Show your employees the results of their online brand advocacy efforts.

If your employees’ online brand advocacy efforts are showing measurable results, make sure they’re aware of the effects their activities are having on the brand and company. They’ll feel more motivated to keep up their efforts knowing that those efforts are actually having an impact.

5. Reward your employees who actively advocate your brand online.

If you can tie brand advocacy efforts back to individual employees, then you should have a method in place to not just acknowledge those employees but also to reward employees who are extremely active or driving real results for the company through their efforts. This is essential if you can tie employee advocacy efforts directly to sales and revenues. Internal brand advocacy can help your company drive word-of-mouth marketing at a fraction of the cost other marketing initiatives would require, so make sure you reward your top employee influencers whose advocacy leads directly to sales.

Image: Svilen Milev

Happiest Brands Understand How to Build Emotional Connections

happy-brands-2014-infographic
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A new study by Isobel and Cog Research, Happy Brands, reveals that the happiest brands build emotional connections with consumers. The study defined happy brands as having four core characteristics: playfulness, happiness, trustworthiness, generosity, and optimism. A total of 1,250 U.K. consumers ranked one hundred of the largest brands from the biggest market categories on those five characteristics as part of this study, and you can see the winners and losers in the infographic to the left.

The happiest brands according to this study are Cadbury, Andrex, and Google while the least happy brands (excluding political parties) are The Royal Bank of Scotland, Ryanair, and The Daily Express. The most trustworthy brands are Nivea, Andrex, and Fairy, but the least trustworthy brands (excluding political parties) are Daily Star, The Sun, and Ryanair.

Isobel found that there is a clear connection between emotions of happiness, perceptions of trust, honesty, and generosity, and brand affinity which grows proportionally with consistency of brand messages and brand experiences. In other words, an ad campaign that tries to position a brand as happy, trustworthy, and honest won’t get the desired results if the ad is inconsistent with the audience’s existing experiences with and perceptions of the brand.

The results of this study aren’t surprising. In 2008, I wrote here on the Corporate Eye blog, “Perhaps the single most important aspect of developing customer loyalty is emotional involvement in your brand. Customers who feel an emotional connection and response to your brand are inherently loyal to it.” I also shared the three steps to build emotional involvement in your brand: stability, sustainability, and security. These are not new concepts. However, what is surprising is that brand marketers still have to fight to get executive buy-in on the importance of investing time, resources, and budget dollars to building emotional connections between brands and consumers.

It’s not just conceptual, visionary marketers calling for the strategic prioritization of emotional branding. Analytical, data-driven marketers understand its value, too. In 2011, I shared results of a study that showed emotional brand advertising is more impactful than logical brand advertising.

In 2012, I wrote an article about the critical importance of consumer emotional involvement in brands. I wrote, “Who says emotions don’t matter? Not brand managers. When consumers are emotionally involved in a brand, that brand has reached an important point of success. Emotional involvement in a brand leads to brand loyalty, brand advocacy, and brand guardianship that money can’t buy. Word-of-mouth marketing by consumers who are emotionally connected to a brand is extremely powerful. Don’t believe me? Ask the marketing team at Harley Davidson or Apple. They’ll tell you how important emotional involvement in a brand is.”

Brands that rank as the happiest understand the importance of consumer emotional involvement in brands. Google uses storytelling to build emotional connections between consumers and its tech brand—a type of brand that is not typically viewed as being inherently emotional. Google started its push to build emotional connections in 2011 with the launch of the first Google Chrome offline ad campaign. AT&T was a brand to benchmark for building emotional connections with consumers when its “Reach out and Touch Someone” ad campaign was a television staple. Today, AT&T is trying to regain that emotional connection through a new “It’s Complicated” ad campaign. Red Bull builds emotional connections with consumers in all of its marketing initiatives and brand experiences. Remember the Red Bull Stratos event? That was a perfect (and successful) example of emotional branding.

Consumers are innately emotional human beings. Trying to work against those emotions is useless, yet marketers still have to fight for the resources and money they need to build emotional connections between their brands and their target audiences. I started writing for Corporate Eye about branding and the importance of building emotional connections between brands and consumers in 2008. That’s seven years ago. I wonder if we’ll still be having this conversation seven years from now in 2020. What do you think?

Google Zeitgeist 2012 – Scarce on Brands but Big on Emotion

google ipadThe Google Zeitgeist 2012 has been released and reveals the top Google searches across the world throughout the past year.

The list of the top trending searches (defined as “search queries with the highest amount of traffic over a sustained period in 2012 as compared to 2011”) in 2012 is heavy on people and tragedies but short on brands. In fact, just two brands or branded products made it on the top 10 list — Apple’s iPad 3 and the Diablo 3 video game.

Top 10 Trending Searches in 2012

  1. Whitney Houston
  2. Gangnam Style
  3. Hurricane Sandy
  4. iPad 3
  5. Diablo 3
  6. Kate Middleton
  7. Olympics 2012
  8. Amanda Todd
  9. Michael Clarke Duncan
  10. BBB12

Similarly, only two branded products made it on the list of the top 10 trending image searches in 2012 according to the 2012 Google Zeitgeist — Apple’s iPhone 5 and the Minecraft video game.

Top 10 Trending Image Searches in 2012

  1. One Direction
  2. Selena Gomez
  3. iPhone 5
  4. Megan Fox
  5. Rihanna
  6. Justin Bieber
  7. Harry Styles
  8. Minecraft
  9. Nicki Minaj
  10. Katy Perry

Things start to get interesting in the Google Zeitgeist 2012 list of the top trending consumer electronics searches where mobile devices dominated. Apple branded products made up three of the top 10 consumer electronics searches followed by Samsung with two of the top 10 searches in this category.

Top 10 Consumer Electronics Searches

  1. iPad 3
  2. Samsung Galaxy S III
  3. iPad Mini
  4. Nexus 7
  5. Galaxy Note 2
  6. PlayStation
  7. iPad 4
  8. Microsoft Surface
  9. Kindle Fire
  10. Nokia Lumia 920

Google Turns Search Trends into an Emotional Branding Opportunity

Google provides perfect proof that with some creative thinking, emotions can be tied to just about any brand in any industry. Google’s television ads over the past couple of years are great examples as is the Google Zeitgeist 2012 video below. Who said search engines can’t make you feel happy, inspired, sad, hopeful, and more? Check out the video below to see for yourself.

Curious how the Google Zeitgeist has changed over the years? I wrote about what brands could learn from the Google Zeitgeist in 2009 here on Corporate Eye, and at that time, social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Hi5 dominated the top search lists. Consumers’ interests change faster than ever these days, and watching search trends provides useful insights that can help brands tailor marketing programs which are relevant and timely.

You can review the complete Google Zeitgeist 2012 list or explore specific 2012 search trends by country on the Zeitgeist 2012 website.

Image: Alan Levine

Store Brands Continue to Gain Popularity While Name Brands Lose Customers

generic store brand krogerThere was a time when the majority of consumers believed that name brands were better than generic store brands. With a perceived higher quality attached to name brands, products with those brand names on them came with higher prices.

However, the perception has shifted (I reported on the shift to store brands here on Corporate Eye multiple times over the past few years — links to those stories and statistics can be found at the end of this article). Today, most consumers believe that store brands and name brands are equal.

The perception gap between store brands and name brands has closed rapidly over the past few years. A recent study from the Integer Group found that 64% of consumers do not think that name brands are better quality than store brands (up from 57% in 2010). Today, 77% of shoppers consider both name brand and store brand products before they make a purchase. The percentage is even higher among women at 90%. Considering that women make or influence the vast amount of purchase decisions, this is an extremely important statistic.

The data from the Integer Group’s “Private Label” report also reveals that brand preference can be greatly affected by category. Important findings related to category brand preferences include:

  • Health and Beauty: 74% of women prefer name brand health and beauty products, but just 56% of men say they prefer name brands in this category.
  • Laundry Detergent: 69% of male and female consumers prefer name brand laundry detergent (the category where brand names were ranked highest in the study).
  • Medicine and Milk: Only 26% of all consumers prefer name brand medicine and milk over store brands.

The rise of store brands isn’t new. The shift has been happening for years as consumers have access to more information and can learn the ingredients in products within minutes. Comparing a specific name brand product to a generic brand product simply requires a web search and a few minutes of reading. With smartphones in hand, consumers can even research brands and products in stores when they’re actively making a purchase decision.

Store brands are well positioned to leverage this shift and steal more market share from name brands. On the other hand, name brands need to focus on building differentiated perceptions in consumers’ minds before they arrive in stores. It’s more important than ever for name brands to tap into consumers’ emotions and create the perception that there is no substitute for the name brand.

Is your brand up to the challenge?

More About Store Brand Trends and Statistics

You can download the full report here.

Image: Lisa Brewster

Microsoft, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and the Story of a Brand Champion Successor

I’ve written about brand champions on the Corporate Eye blog before. While I think Hugh Hefner of Playboy is the ultimate brand champion, I also believe that Steve Jobs of Apple is an excellent example of a brand champion. You can read some of my thoughts about Steve Jobs as a brand champion in:

I also think that Bill Gates was a great example of a brand champion. His role in Microsoft’s success and his powerful advocacy and guardianship of the brand were two of the reasons Microsoft grew to be one of the most powerful brands in the world. However, when Bill Gates retired from his role as the leader of Microsoft and handed the reins over to Steve Ballmer, a big gaping hole was left open with no one to fill it.

For many reasons, Steve Ballmer is not the brand champion that Bill Gates was. One could argue that his demeanor doesn’t lend itself to the role of brand champion, but as Microsoft’s disappointing results and lackluster product launches over the past few years have shown us, he’s not getting the job done from the numbers side either.

In a recent article on Inc.com, writer Renee Oricchio asks, “Is a Gates Comeback Inevitable?”  It’s actually a good question. Could a return by the Microsoft brand champion turn the company around? It certainly couldn’t hurt. While it’s unlikely that Gates would return to his prior role at Microsoft (but never say never), Oricchio makes a good point when she writes, “Microsoft is in a malaise. It needs more than a new CEO who looks good on paper with the right background in launching new products, trimming the fat, blah blah blah. There are plenty of folks around with that kind of resume. But, Microsoft needs to be inspired again. It needs to return to its take-no-prisoners swagger. It needs a return to its greatness.”

A strong brand is a focused brand and Microsoft has lost its focus. The company has stalled in the widespread consumer perception of the brand.

I still have hope for Microsoft. I want them to find a true brand champion successor to Bill Gates who can bring the company back to its days as an industry leader with innovative products that make people’s lives better and easier. Consumers want to have that emotional involvement with the Microsoft brand back again, but after years of failing to meet consumers’ expectations for the brand, the company has work to do to rebuild consumer perception, trust, and loyalty.

I think Microsoft can do it. Who will champion the brand? Many experts are calling for Steve Ballmer to be replaced. Let’s hope that his replacement understands what made Microsoft great, and let’s hope shareholders will allow his replacement to take the necessary steps to rebuild the brand.

What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Flickr