This week I’ve been exploring the conflict between employee and corporate brands here on Sensei Blogs and during our weekly Twitter debate.
The discussion has taken many twists and turns touching on HR policies, corporate risk, brand strategies and even customer service; however, during this week’s #bizforum chat there was one issue that really captured my imagination. It’s the question: at what point does the brand begin to compete with the individual employee for customer loyalty?
Many marketers are working towards humanizing their brands, which has included allowing employees to actively engage with the public through social streams. In many businesses this is a group of people rather than an individual including community managers, customer service reps, marketers and/or executives.
Some firms ride the coat-tails of of media-savvy personnel they acquire to represent them and whose personal brands becomes that much more influential as a result. More often than not, an employee becomes “socially-famous” while engaging the public on behalf of their employer. Whichever scenario built up the reputation of these individuals, there’s an inherent threat in their brand-sanctioned social activism.
Question: When does an employee’s brand become too powerful for the employer?
Answer: when customers become more loyal to the personality than the business or its product.
Answer: when customers become more loyal to the personality than the business or its product.
Allowing employees to shine on your business’ behalf demonstrates that you only recruit and support top talent, which in turn, reflects on your brand and values. The corporate brand benefits from association and the earned media garnered through their social engagement. Some even argue that it promotes employee loyalty and retention. So it’s a win/win right?
The Loyalty Tipping Point
Not so fast; as Stan Reeser argued this week during the #bizforum debate: a strong employee brand is antithetical to a corporate brand. Successful corporations demand loyalty to the brand or product not the employee; employees are agents for the business. They’re hired to assist the business achieve its goals. A business’ goal is to operate profitably today and establish a foundation for continued profitable operations into the future. Yes, a successful business ensures that the employee’s goals are aligned in the achievement of the corporate goal, but never forget which one is on top of the food chain.
When an employee’s performance, service or even personal habits become a hindrance to that corporate mission, corrective action must be taken. When such efforts yield no change, the individual must be terminated. When customers become more loyal to an individual than the brand, the employee becomes a potentially disruptive force to the future of the business and its ability to meet future profit goals. The risk is that the employee accepts higher remuneration or position with a competitor, causing customers loyal to them to also move the competitor.
You can argue that this was the case before social media and so there’s no real difference but there is.
1. Social Media’s intensification (maybe surprisingly) engenders greater trust and loyalty with the social personality than in the traditional employee-customer relationship. Call it the celebrity-factor; Social Media popularity broaches star-status, which is more powerful than admiration within smaller personal circles.
2. Social Media’s amplification creates loyalty in non-customers by delivering human-like connections and trust. Non-customer loyalty is evidenced when customers who would have purchased your product, end up buying from the competition because the personality they trust are representing them now.
Brand Trust Is Transferable
Kenny Rose argued this week that this is a problem of integrity, not branding. While this may be true, as he stated himself: “there’s no template” for a solution. The threat goes beyond employee integrity. It’s not even about the greed of employees. The most genuine and well-intentioned employee has personnel conflicts with their superiors, gets bored or experiences life/family changes; any of which are reasons for jumping ship. And even the most honorable person can’t stop loyal customers from following them. In fact, they seem to earn the most loyal followers.
Brand Trust – a factor decreed critical to customer acquisition and retention – is transferable when trust is given to an employee and not your brand. Trust follows its target not the brand that employed him or her.
Businesses cannot ignore Social Media engagement, so what’s the solution? They cannot encourage employees to perform poorly in order to regulate the loyalty they earn. Further, to remain competitive businesses require a good measure of such employee advocates and influencers to propel their brand.
It might be as simple as redesigning customer development strategies to safeguard brand loyalty by ensuring high-profile social employees create emotional connections between the consumer and the product – not themselves. Social Media is channel that promotes vanity. The lights and fanfare directed towards those who have earned celebrity status is blinding. Customer development strategies must be reinvented to leverage these social personalities and not be held hostage by them.
My recommendation for business strategists: focus on creating a unified customer experience across all touch points of the business. By generating fanaticism for the experience of using the product, paying their bills, receiving customer support, engaging in your community and so forth, loyalty to an individual – regardless of how durable it is – becomes just one of many equally solid connections between the customer and your brand. The risk of competing with your employee for customer loyalty is mitigated when this customer experience balance is established across your customer touch-points and you’re free to embrace social-celebrity employees.
What tactics can be deployed to mitigate the risk of socially-powerful employees stealing your customer’s loyalty?
Related: When Personal and Corporate Brands Collide
Related: Should Corporations Fire Personal Brands?
Related: Should Corporations Fire Personal Brands?
Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
