Source: Times Ascent | The Times of India

A BRAND CANNOT MERELY BE BUILT THROUGH ADVERTISING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS. VIREN NAIDU FINDS OUT HOW ORGANISATIONS ARE REACHING OUT TO THEIR EMPLOYEES AND SOLICITING THEIR IDEAS, IN AN ENDEAVOUR TO ENHANCE BRAND EQUITY, AWARENESS AND RECALL

SOLICITING IDEAS…

Building an ‘employer of choice’ brand entails drawing and retaining quality talent. Given the job opportunities in India, employees are not content being just passive participants in their own careers; they are choosing to drive it. Employees want to work for organisations that are visible, innovative, have well-defined values and showcase solid growth. Aquil Busrai, Executive Director – HR, IBM India/South Asia who points out the above ideology says that being alive to this change in the workforce of the 21st century by building HR policies to support this will help attract potential candidates and at the same time, create a highly motivated workforce. And this can only be

possible if employees are empowered to contribute to their brand’s growth and potential candidates, too, feel that the employer truly believes in “employee empowerment” and is not just paying lip service.

Arnab Banerjee, VP- Sales & Marketing, Ceat which has an ‘Advisory Management Council (AMC)’, an employee group consisting of high-calibre young professionals who ideate over critical strategic issues facing the company’s future growth plans, says, “Involving employees in the process gets them to share with the company their views and ideas. The recent repositioning exercise that CEAT undertook was spearheaded by a young CEAT marketing team.” When CEAT embarked on the brand repositioning exercise, they realised that the proposition of “Born Tough” and the rhino as the identity, though salient had long lost their relevance. “While the non-commercial team and the younger employees were clearly for the new identity, there was strong opposition from the commercial marketing team/older employees who saw the rhino as still relevant in the truck segment. A very young team orchestrated this entire exercise of convincing the entire set of employees before launching the identity change campaign,” adds Banerjee.

At Steria, they conduct ‘People Poll’, an employee satisfaction survey which lays special emphasis on a section called, “branding”. This is a platform wherein people can express their views on how branding initiatives could be made more efficient. One can even post comments sharing their opinions on the existing logo. In the sidelines of Xansa’s transformation and re-branding into Steria, post the acquisition, one such suggestion (regarding recruitment) made by an employee was to execute a radio jingle, as part of the advertising strategy, and air it on a popular radio station. The jingle was a 20 second catchy testimonial by a young Steria employee that talked about the career opportunities offered at Steria to a technology fresher like himself and other prospective employees. “The feedback filled in by this employee exactly stated what should go on air in this jingle,” adds Sachdev Ramakrishna, Director - Marketing, Steria India.

PROPAGATING IDEAS…

Anurag Jain, Regional Managing Director-Asia Pacific and President- Applications Solutions (AS) and Insurance & Business Process Solutions (IBPS), Perot Systems believes that new age companies can achieve success when the branding or management strategies of the company are derived through a strong foundational culture of employee participation. Employees and potential candidates are tuned in to the market dynamics and in this age of web 2.0 and pervasive social media, they are the main influencers of the company’s brand in the marketplace. For the branding of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative, they called for nominations from associates and received several entries. The name that was finally shortlisted was ‘Deeksha’, a sanskrit word that stands for initiation of divine energy transfer. Even a suggestion as small as making the pronunciation right of the company name was taken into consideration. “The “Perot” in Perot Systems is pronounced with “T” being silent; our associates wanted to ensure that the name was pronounced correctly and hence we began a radio campaign to ensure that the correct pronunciation reached out to people,” adds Jain. At IBM, recently, when one of the business units was re-defining its vision and mission, they sought the creative talent of their employee base. They reached out to the employees through a contest, which enabled them to submit their creative ideas.

FOSTERING IDEAS…

At Birlasoft, they had created a new brand identity and there was a slight difference between the old logo and the new logo. “The challenge we had, was to make the internal audience aware and receptive to this change. We decided to create a graphical animation with a real model in it. The model we used was an employee. The whole series was around how this character learns different aspects of the brand and in the process evolves from a casual, laidback person into a thorough professional. The campaign was an instant hit,” adds Shiva Subramaniam, assistant. manager, brand marketing and corporate communications, Birlasoft. Vijay Nair, Business Analyst, Birlasoft narrates another experience: Birlasoft Hyderabad center was just setup and not many knew about the company. We had to establish brand awareness, primarily among prospective employees. People at the Hyderabad office wanted an aggressive local brand presence. We set up a local team of people from diverse roles with a common voice and christened it as ‘Voice of Birlasoft’ with two clear objectives through which the exercise was carried out: CSR and external and internal branding activities.

Uday Punj, MD, Chimes Group explains one of the company’s branding exercises that involved their employees, “Chimes logo is derived from the “fibonacci series” (It represents the natural series that is followed for growth, i.e. the pattern in which trees grow, flowers blossom etc. It’s a mathematical series which defines the most effective growth pattern). The logo designing was done with the core team, and hence, we were clear about what fibonacci meant and assumed it would be simple for all to interpret. When we were doing our branding session with the cross functional team, our accounts manager pointed out that it took him quite some time getting the pronunciation of fibonacci right and it was even difficult to explain the same to the vendors he deals with, so he did a web-search and suggested we call it the “golden ratio” instead, as it meant the same thing!”

So the next time, you are planning a brand revamp, besides, just the branding team, do remember to shoot an email to all your employees as the ideas and suggestions put forth by them might just take you by surprise!