Marketing and your brand is as much about the culture of your organisation – including internal productivity, employee education and motivation, as it is about growing your external customer base. We often hear about workplace stress and an article in the WSJ has given some suggestions about the causes and some fixes which I will summarise. The three causes are ‘Volume, Velocity and Abuse.’ The volume of work is just too high, particularly with the cutbacks in staff. The pace is ever faster and the demands more, particularly because of the increase in technology. And abuse relates to everything from harassment, to office politics and outright abuse.
The five suggestions in summary are: 1) Focus and reduce the workload – people often feel they have to do a lot of things, but do less and do them better. 2) Acknowledge flexible time and location – reduce commutes and provide more work-life flexibility. 3) Don’t overuse technology such as email, IM etc and don’t use email for emotional topics that require nuance and sensitivity 4) Avoid long hours – productivity apparently reduces after about 40 hours a week. 5) Identify problem people and deal with them. “Employers need to identify problem people and put them on notice that their behavior will not be tolerated.”
A lot of these are obvious and we may have read before, but I think they are good to be reminded of. Building brands and successful marketing is very much about the culture of your company. You can’t be one thing as an internal culture and try to be another thing to your customers and the outside world – and this is even more the case now that we have a much more transparent environment through the internet and social media. These are some basic standards – and your brand values can often be built around them – based on researching what it is that your customers want your brand to be. So whether you are a small or medium business and wherever you are on your brand-building journey, you can improve the real essence of your brand by building an internal culture that reflects who you want to be to your customers.
