B randing has traditionally looked outwards. We worry about what the customer sees, hears and remembers. We spend our time, energy and efforts on company/ product naming, logo designing, colours, tagline creation, advertising campaign and customer communication strategising.
All important. But there is one uncomfortable question we often miss.
Who actually delivers the brand promise?
In most organisations, it is not the advertisement. It is an employee. The receptionist. The salesperson. The service engineer. The teacher. The branch manager. The person handling a complaint.
This is where I believe branding needs to travel inwards.
Let’s call this Intrinsic Branding.
Extrinsic Branding and Intrinsic Branding
Most of what we commonly call branding is Extrinsic Branding. It works largely through Language and Symbols. The name, visual identity, packaging, advertising, communication and the stories we tell the market.
Intrinsic Branding works through something different:
Behaviour. Rituals. Community. While Extrinsic Branding helps a company look and sound different, Intrinsic Branding helps it feel and behave different.
One is not a substitute for the other. A
While Extrinsic Branding helps a company look and sound different, Intrinsic Branding helps it feel and behave different.
strong brand needs both.
The real problem begins when the external promise becomes far stronger than the internal reality. The customer is told one story, but experiences another.
A brand is therefore not only what an organisation says, but what its people repeatedly do. Broken promises never speak good of anyone.
There is another expensive mistake. Many organisations consciously think about branding only after they attain scale, although they have already spent years choosing names, logos, websites, language and customer practices. By the time branding is formally outsourced, many important brand decisions have already been made. Rituals, not necessarily appropriate have already hardened.
You can outsource brand execution. Never outsource brand ownership.
When the Rulebook Ran Out: The Taj 2008 In not too long-ago distant memory, the Taj Mahal Palace during the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks remains one of the most powerful examples of this.
Employees helped guests escape, protected them and continued to serve under conditions no normal service manual could possibly have anticipated. Eleven Taj employees lost their lives while helping guests. Tata has written that many of the actions taken by these employees were not prescribed in manuals.
That is the important part. In an extreme situation, the rulebook had effectively run out. Yet, behaviour did not disappear with it.
Something deeper took over. We can call it culture, values, training, duty or pride. I would describe it as the brand having travelled deep enough inside the organisation to influence behaviour when nobody had time to consult a poster on the wall.
At that moment, the people were the brand.
The Three Building Blocks
Intrinsic Branding can be understood through three simple building blocks.
Behaviour asks: What do people here do differently because they belong to this organisation?
A value such as “customer first” is easy
to write. But what does it make a frontline employee actually do when a customer has a problem? If employees do not act differently because of it, “customer first” remains just a statement.
Rituals are how desired behaviour gets repeated. What gets discussed every Monday? What stories are told during induction? What behaviour gets recognised publicly? What does the leader repeatedly ask, notice and reward?
Repeated action turns an idea into organisational muscle memory.
Community is the next level. This is when employees stop saying, “The company wants us to do this,” and begin to say:
“This is how we do things here.” That small change from “the company” to “we” is powerful.
Community creates shared language, stories, heroes, traditions and pride. People no longer merely follow a system. They begin to identify with it.
Principles to Practice: A Piaggio Experience
I spent a good amount of time working with the team at Piaggio Vehicles’ corporate office in Pune, India, enough to feel the pulse
Sometimes, branding begins with the floor an employee walks on, the workplace he sees every day
of the organisation and its unique culture.
The corporate office had the feel of a professional multinational organisation. The company was a strong player in the three-wheeler market and its products were presented through polished brochures and marketing material.
But during my visits to the Baramati plant, I sensed a disconnect.
Here were people actually manufacturing those vehicles, yet many were barely connected to the brand they were helping create. Most had hardly even seen the glossy brochures that showcased the very vehicles they were manufacturing. For several employees, the factory was primarily a source of stable employment. The pride and identity visible at the corporate end had not travelled
equally strongly to the plant.
I raised this concern with the senior leadership. Fortunately, the MD himself gave me a favourable ear.
What followed was not a new advertising campaign. Attention moved to the internal environment itself: plant infrastructure, workspaces, landscaping, stronger HR leadership and greater local administrative ownership.
To me, the lesson was significant. You cannot build a premium brand outside while allowing the people who manufacture it to experience a completely different organisation inside.
Sometimes, branding begins with the floor an employee walks on, the workplace he sees every day and whether he feels proud saying:
“I make this.” Ritz-Carlton: Making Culture Repeatable
Ritz-Carlton offers another useful example. Its famous line, “We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen,” is supported by its Gold Standards, Credo, Employee Promise and Service Values.
The important point is not the elegance of the sentence. It is the attempt to make a service philosophy repeatable through the
organisation.
Taj shows us that culture can reveal itself in an extraordinary moment.
Ritz-Carlton shows us that desired behaviour can also be deliberately reinforced in ordinary moments.
Why This Must Belong on the HR Agenda
This is why I believe HR is one of the most overlooked functions in brand-building in an organisation.
Marketing may articulate the brand promise.
HR helps build the human system capable of keeping it.
Recruitment decides who enters the brand.
Induction tells them what the organisation stands for.
Leadership demonstrates what is really acceptable.
Performance systems indicate what actually matters.
Recognition decides which behaviour become stories.
Training builds capability. Rituals create repetition. And culture eventually decides whether employees merely work for an organisation or identify with it.
This also explains why employer branding alone is not enough.
Employer branding tells a prospective employee why this is a good organisation to join.
Intrinsic Branding asks a different question:
Once the person joins, what kind of brand ambassador will that person become?
That is a much tougher question. Because a beautifully designed brand guideline is relatively easy to copy. A deeply aligned organisation is not. The Question Before the Communication
Companies frequently ask: “How do we communicate our brand better?” It is a valid question. But perhaps there is
a question that should come before it.
If our employees truly understood, believed in and owned our brand, what would they do differently tomorrow morning?
Would the customer notice? Would another employee notice? Would a new recruit notice? If the answer is yes, we are moving beyond branding as communication and into branding as organisational behaviour.
That is where Intrinsic Branding begins. The strongest brands are not merely recognised by customers.
They are lived by employees.
(Paul is the Intrinsic Brand Coach at 3P Cube Consultants. He combines neuroscience, behaviour and culture to understand why some brands become iconic while others remain ordinary, helping organisations build brands without relying on trial-and-error.)
