Internal Affairs

Happy employees make better brand ambassadors. So do happy retailers, happy B2B customers and happy customer service reps.

That has prompted some companies to put a consumer-marketing polish on campaigns targeting internal audiences — including B2B, trade shows and employee programs.

Some marketers spiff up traditional trade pitches to match consumer-marketing standards. Take Pergo, now in its second year with a tour that lets DIY retail staffers try out Pergo laminate flooring by bowling.

Others add an internal overlay to rally employees before a big consumer campaign. Witness Fidelity’s voicemail to its 42,000 staffers from Sir Paul McCartney, announcing the marketing deal that put McCartney in Fidelity ads and Fidelity behind McCartney’s 2005 tour. “There were women, administrators, crying,” says Fidelity Senior VP Kathleen Hall.

Companies that treat employees like an important first audience share three attributes, according to events agency Jack Morton Worldwide: clarity (all staffers know the brand promise), coherence (the promise is woven into all activities), and control (someone manages the brand promise as a corporate asset). Happier employees become good brand ambassadors; they also work faster and smarter, since they know the brand promise — and their role in delivering it.

There’s a growing need for companies to get staff — and management — on board with marketing plans beyond advertising. Big-ticket sponsorships, customer relationship marketing, face-to-face event marketing all need buy-in beyond the brand team.

“More and more marketers are on a quest to prove that marketing is more than advertising,” says Larry Deutsch, executive VP-managing director at 141 Worldwide. “Senior management has often grown up with traditional communications and has to be shown the value of promotion and integrated marketing.”

It’s no surprise that engaged employees improve business results. A 2004 study by the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement quantified the connection (April 2005 PROMO). Its survey of 5,568 employees at 90 U.S. media companies measured employee satisfaction and engagement (separately) and corporate culture. The study found that organizational communication — up and down the ranks — has the biggest impact on staffer satisfaction. And employee satisfaction — along with good management, job design and a cooperative (not passive) or competitive (not aggressive) culture — makes for the best engaged employees.

Last fall, Motorola took its MotoZone consumer marketing mobile tour to its eight corporate campuses to rally staffers behind Motorola’s seven-year-old NFL sponsorship. Daylong fairs at Motorola offices from September through December let staffers tour the Locker Room and Living Room demo areas, sit in an SUV with Bluetooth stereo and phone and toss a football through a giant Razr phone to win prizes — just like fans at MotoZone’s NFL stops. 141 Worldwide, Chicago, handles the tour.

Motorola gave 5,320 staffers an inflatable premium of its iconic headset worn by NFL coaches. Employee attendance rose 22% in 2005 over a similar tour the year before, reaching an average 662 employees at each event — nearly 6,000 staffers in all, about 60% of Motorola’s U.S. workforce. Vignettes about the consumer tour ran on Motorola’s in-house TV network.

The consumer tour touts Motorola products from handsets to Bluetooth-enabled appliances and Ojo personal videophones. For staff, that translates to a wider appreciation for all teams working on all products, not just headsets.

“Representing a broader portfolio of products tells the fullest innovation story possible. When people can give you the elevator pitch and share the brand with their family and friends, that reinforces the value of those marketing programs, especially sponsorships,” Deutsch says. “At so many organizations, the understanding behind marketing in limited.”

Circuit City uses a similar tack, bringing its Circuit City Ride mobile show to its Richmond, VA headquarters to let its estimated 3,000 staffers there check out the car audio and video gear on display. The vehicle will tour 35 consumer events this year, from Hot Import Nights tuner shows to motocross expos and Vans Warped Tour concerts, touting audio and video components from 24 manufacturers (who fund the tour). Like consumers, staffers tour the Kicker Livin’ Loud Lounge, duel at Playstation in a Pioneer game pod, compare speakers in an open-air display. (The tour boosted store traffic 800% in 2004, its first year.) Nearly 75% of staffers came out for the headquarters stop, despite a steady rain, says Glenn Goodwin, VP for The Spark Agency, St. Louis, which handles Circuit City Ride. Another 750 Circuit City employees toured Ride at a sales conference last month.

“Many people don’t understand the value of these vehicles until they experience it,” Goodwin says. “And when it’s your brand represented there, you’re way proud.”

Fidelity kept its own staffers in mind when negotiating last year with McCartney, who appeared in one of Fidelity’s “Smart Move” ads and collaborated to form the Music Lives Foundation to raise money to support music programs in schools (October 2005 PROMO). Fidelity negotiated with McCartney for six to eight months, then hammered out details like which song to use in the spot. McCartney also recorded an internal voicemail that was delivered to Fidelity staffers the morning of the announcement that he was partnering with Fidelity. “We were kind of goofing around, saying, ‘You know what’s cool is just talking to Paul, hearing the accent,’” Hall says. “So he agreed to do an employee voicemail … that went out to all 42,000 Fidelity employees that said, ‘Good morning. This is Paul McCartney. I’m new around here’ just like he was talking to you. It was pretty cool.”

Sometimes a brand’s internal audience is its gateway to consumers — think retailers, or travel agents. This year Celebrity Cruises expands a campaign to give travel agents in 15 to 20 markets a taste of its cruise experience. (The effort dovetails with the cruise line’s “Celebrity Treatment” consumer campaign; new ads broke in January.)

Travel agents are invited to an upscale evening event at a posh locale to sample Celebrity’s cuisine and spa services, and network with fellow agents. Celebrity and its agency, Arnold Brand Promotions, aim for about 100 agents at each event. “One hundred people is a festive environment; it’s not 10 people who don’t know each other standing around,” says Michael Carey, Arnold VP-group account director.

A surprising 85% of travel agents haven’t ever been on a cruise at all. “How can they talk about Celebrity if they’ve never experienced it?” Carey posits. Celebrity Treatment began in 2005 in fewer markets. “We’re blowing it out this year to give agents more touch-and-feel experience with the brand” and additional education to sell Celebrity’s products, he said.

The events complement other travel agent incentives. A sweeps that ran November through January gave agents one sweepstakes entry for each cruise they booked. Grand prize was a 2006 Lexus; two first-prize winners got a Caribbean cruise for four, and 100 winners each got a $100 gas card. The sweeps pulled in 3,000 participants — a whopping 10% of all 30,000 agents in the U.S.

Pergo, which makes laminate flooring, targets the sales reps at home-improvement stores with an education campaign that looks like a consumer mobile marketing tour and acts like product training. Pergo sets up in store parking lots, and lets staffers play on the floor: there’s a bowling alley made with Pergo, for example. “It’s as cool a way as we’d do it for consumers,” says Beth Rice, executive VP-director of Arnold Brand Promotions, which handles the program for Pergo. The tour first ran last year, and goes out again in 2006 with a new vehicle and new ads.

B2B marketing, too, is moving mainstream. This summer, Visa USA will begin B2B marketing that builds on new image ads that broke last month. The campaign, whose tagline “Life Takes Visa” replaces the long running “Everywhere you want to be,” starts with heavy consumer branding but adds B2B to leverage Visa’s $126 billion commercial business. That segment, mostly corporate credit and debit accounts, has grown exponentially from less than $10 billion in 1995.

Even trade shows are getting more glitz. Boeing won kudos for its polished presence at the air show Farnborough International 2004, where Boeing bowed its 787 Dreamliner plane. Forget a show booth; Boeing’s “Dreamspace” brought buyers, pilots and reporters out to the tarmac to sample not only the seats and the view, but aspirational branding fit for an image ad campaign. Boeing sold 126 planes at $15 billion-plus; airplane orders rose 14% over 2003. 141 Worldwide, Chicago, handled the event for Boeing and was a PRO Award finalist for Most Innovative Communication Strategy — not, as one might expect, B2B.

Napster opted for a garage instead of a booth to tout its music download service to Digital Life Expo’s 45,000 consumer attendees. The Napster Garage — an homage to garage bands and Internet startups — was decked out with garage-sale guitars, sofas, rock poster and crates of LPs. An old ping pong table held laptops used for demos. It was a clever (and cost-effective) way to compete with the glitzy big-budget booths of Microsoft, HP and Toshiba. Grand Central Marketing, New York, handled the October expo for Napster.

ENGINEERING ENTHUSIASM CHECK YOUR BRAND

“A brand is the DNA of an organization, the code that determines how the product, service or team should act, look and evolve,” says Steven Overman, director of strategic effectiveness at events agency Jack Morton Worldwide. “The most powerful branding comes from within.”

Jack Morton segments staffers into four types, based on how they see the brand, and how outspoken they are. Then it tweaks the internal branding message for each group: drivers (on brand and active); residents (on brand but inactive); cynics (off brand and inactive); and critics (off brand but active).

“If you put elements of strategy in people’s hands, they feel empowered,” Overman says.

When Coca-Cola launched a new marketing campaign, the company asked staffers to submit their own stories about memorable Coke moments for an exhibit in Coke’s Atlanta headquarters. A “glass quilt” combined 21 staffers’ photos and stories with brand imagery; new panels were added regularly over two weeks until the exhibit covered the lobby.
— BS