Introspection

Your most important audience is also the most overlooked: your own staff.

Read on to learn why:

① Communicating a strong employer brand turns staff into your ambassadors.

② Any audience in your marketing plan should be analysed.

③ The UK wants a slice of the crypto pie but only for institutional investors.

④ Leaders in financial services continue to prioritise blockchain projects.

⑤ Naming should be entrusted to your Marketing team, not your Product team.

⑥ Flexibility may come at the price of being able to concentrate.

⑦ Good marketers don’t sell, they build trust and loyalty.

What's new

Raconteur published a piece this week on the importance of internal branding.

① In short:

“According to Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report, only 10% of the UK’s employees are engaged. The workplace consultancy found that, across Europe in 2023, 72% of the workforce was quiet quitting, 15% were loud quitting and 56% felt it was a good time to find a new job. There is work to be done in changing how employees feel about their workplaces, and it might well be the CMO’s job to do this.”
“Companies with powerful external brands ⁠– think Google, Lego, Netflix, or Nike ⁠– all benefit from having innovative and interesting products. But a lot of their success also comes from having huge workforce buy-in. These companies have clear vision and mission statements, which are often summarised in quotable slogans or mottos. Netflix’s tagline ‘Watch what you want, when you want’, for example, echoes its commitment to flexibility and choice. For workers, this means flexible working policies and unlimited employee holiday allowance. Nike, meanwhile, is very particular about the language it uses to describe its staff. The sportswear giant says it employs ‘team-mates’ and talks about the entire organisation as if it were always working towards one collective goal.”
“Creating and communicating a strong employer brand can not only boost engagement among your staff, but also turn them into brand ambassadors. If workers feel truly inspired by the company mission and vision, this can even continue once they leave the business and do wonders for future recruitment.”

Why it matters

This story matters because it highlights two blind spots in modern marketing. The first is that it is too often assumed that if marketing focuses on external audiences - primarily your prospective customers and partners - then internal audiences, your staff, will ‘get the message’; there is no need to cater specifically to them. Reader, there is.

The second is that - certainly in most companies I’ve worked - the responsibility for ‘internal’ comms is ill-defined. Often being left to an ad hoc arrangement between the senior leadership team, the communications people, and the head of HR. Rarely does anyone feel real ownership for it. As Gallup’s research makes clear, that’s a dangerous ambiguity.

Your staff should actually be your first and most important audience. Quite apart for the enormous benefits in terms of staff retention and attraction, the real prize here is that your staff are your best ambassadors, they’re the ones who are going to go out into the world - in person or online - and engage with your customers, your prospects, your partners, and other prospective hires. They are your brand. It’s critical that they feel proud to be part of that brand, that they can articulate it, and are motivated to do so.

What to do about it

Take action

The first market your marketing teams needs to conquer is your own team. On Monday, ask your head of marking to show you their strategy and messaging house. Are your staff - past, present and future - identified as a distinct target audience?

② This is critical because any audience or persona in your marketing plan should not just be identified but analysed. There are four key questions to answer:

What do you want to achieve with them? Likely attract and retain the best of them, then inspire them to be your loudest advocates.
Who are they? Would-class specialists in your business sector who could be prospective employees, current employees, or ex-exployees.
What do they want? In simple terms: be proud of their employer and share its vision and mission; feel valued and be able to explain your business easily.
What can you offer them? Attractive employer branding; regular and transparent communications; and an intranet that offers ‘a single source of truth’ to help bolster culture and consistency.

Get help

Join the InMarketing community on Substack (you’ll need to download the Substack app and head to the chat tab) to ask questions of me and fellow IMTW readers.

If you found this useful or know someone who would, please share it. Every time you do, it helps me grow the community of regular IMTW readers.

Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

UK regulator to allow crypto-related securities

③ The UK wants a slice of the crypto pie but only for institutional investors.

Source: The Financial Times, 11 March 2024

“The UK’s financial regulator will allow some bitcoin-linked securities to be listed on the stock market, in a softening of its tough stance on digital assets as investors around the world snap up funds investing directly in cryptocurrencies.”
“The Financial Conduct Authority said on Monday it would ‘not object’ to the creation of bitcoin and ethereum-backed exchange traded notes for professional investors.”
“Issuers can apply to list notes that are linked to the bitcoin and ethereum coins on the London Stock Exchange from April. ETNs are debt securities that track an underlying asset but are traded and settled through a central market entity like a stock exchange and securities depository.”

TECHNOLOGY

Financial firms to increase DLT investment as much as AI

④ Leaders in financial services continue to prioritise blockchain projects.

“Over the next two years, firms in the financial services sector plan to increase investment in DLT by 20%, which only slightly lags AI (21%). That’s according to a digital transformation survey conducted by Broadridge based on responses from 500 senior executives.”
“One of the features of the research was a classification of companies into technology leaders or non-leaders based on several factors. Regarding blockchain and DLT implementation, 92% of leaders are engaged compared to 65% of non-leaders. Leaders are more advanced, with 72% progressing to mid or advanced implementation compared to 34% for non-leaders.”
“One of the questions asked whether DLT would reduce the need for custodians and clearinghouses for post-trade and issuance. Thirty-six percent of respondents agreed.”

MEDIA & MARKETING

Naming is part of marketing

⑤ You should leave naming to your Marketing team, not your Product team.

Seth Godin. Source: LinkedIn, 16 March 2024

“A name is a hook for us to hang a story on. Patagonia is a great name because while most people have no idea where the place known as Patagonia is, they’re able to associate it with the story that the company has been telling for a long time. Nike is a great name, even though it’s not obvious how to pronounce it.”
“The industry that’s the current world champ at bad naming is AI. ChatGPT is a terrible name. And the trademark office in the US just denied them ownership in GPT, so even if they were a pioneer, that’s gone now. It’s hard to tell the story when you don’t know what to call it.”
“Claude.ai isn’t particularly distinctive (something about the phonemes make me keep forgetting it, and without a bookmark, I’d never find it again), and Gemini walks away from the huge value that Google has invested into the name of their search engine.”

WILDCARD

Every location has got worse for getting actual work done

⑥ Flexibility may come at the price of being able to concentrate.

As it emerged that half of UK workers would turn down pay rise to keep working from home but 40% of companies are calling staff back in the office five days a week, The Economist argues all locations are ill-equipped for work:

“If you need to focus on work, you can now skip the commute, stay home and get your head down. This tactic would have worked well in 2019, when no one else was ever at home. Now there are likely to be other people there, too, grabbing the best spot for the Wi-Fi, merrily eating your lunch and talking loudly to a bunch of colleagues in their own workplaces. Home has become a co-working space but without any of the common courtesies.”
“One natural response is to head to the place you were trying to avoid—the office. But its role has changed since the pandemic. It was never a great place for concentrating (the periods of lockdown were glorious exceptions). But it has become even less suitable now that the office is seen as the place where collaboration and culture-building happen.”
“What about co-working spaces and coffee shops? These too have got worse since the pandemic. First, there is more competition for spaces. Everyone else who is finding it hard to concentrate has had exactly the same idea of heading to a third location. Second, online meetings have made it acceptable to reach everyone everywhere. It used to be said that you are never more than six feet away from a rat; now the same is true of a Zoom call.”

The Artificial Intelligence Spotlight 🔦

Sendbird: No code AI chatbot for websites and mobile apps.

Guidde: Magically create video documentation with AI.

Slite: Magic document formatter.

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Marketing consultant Scott Stratten on building loyalty to survive disruption:

Scott Stratten. Source: LinkedIn, 16 March 2024

“Good business is about relationships, not buy or goodbye.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Strive for InMarketing: innovate, interact, influence.

Wishing you a productive week,

P.S. I’m sad to report that the exacting standards are slipping somewhat at the spiritual home of the martini (neither gin nor glass were properly frozen when I visited Friday), but it remains one of the best ways to start your evening.