Brand story integration

Your employees are some of your primary storytellers. Each time they interact with your customers, they have an opportunity to build, enhance or damage your Brand Story. You need to ensure that your processes, procedures, practices, and training communicate your Brand Story. In particular, you need to get your senior executives on board. Employees look to leadership to reinforce the messages and behaviors they are asked to reflect. Fostering the complete engagement between your Brand Story and your employees should be your top priority in your 360° Brand Story building strategy.

Your brand is essentially like a stage production that never closes…and this is especially true of organizations where the delivery of your brand is often in the hands (and hearts) of guides, drivers, concierges, maids, front‐line staff and the like. You want them to adhere to the script. But you also want them to walk and talk your brand in a manner that is heartfelt, authentic and true to whom they are as individuals and as a team. And when there is a need for improvisation in the field, at the property, having a brand story that is deeply understood and embraced substantially improves the chances your customers’ expectations will be exceeded. If they have successfully internalized your Brand Story, then you have achieved an ideal platform from which to provide customer services consistent with your Story.

You also need to coordinate customer and employee interaction with the physical plant at every touch point. How does your physical facility look, act, taste, smell, sound, feel? If you can deliver a sensory experience in both the front and the back of the house that exemplifies your Brand Story, you have created a winning stage for building a loyal following for your brand.

Cascadia Marketing offers the following brand story integration services to help you infuse your brand story throughout your organization:

• An ‘A to Z’ mapping of all consumer touch points from initial contact to purchase to post-purchase follow up in order to identify specific gaps, redundancies and areas for improvement in operations, customer service, product, marketing communications, etc.

• Identification and/or refinement of ‘signature’ brand icons and how to best implement and utilize them to support your overarching brand story.

• Creation of an internal e-based communication series to reinforce and dramatize the importance of making every customer interaction (brand moment of truth) count; content for this series is designed to be short and engaging (using video as appropriate) to provide testimonials, celebrate successes, etc.

• Similar to above, creation of ongoing content that takes one ‘point’ of the Cascadia Brand Compass and brings it to life through examples of brand delivery that are ‘on point’ and ‘off point’.

• Mystery shopper audits to provide crucial objective feedback.