新西兰marketing assignment—员工品牌战略研究

企业组织是一个全新的并有待改进的模型，这类模型被营销顾问和高管大力推广，这个新模型以加强一个组织在竞争市场的地位而盛名，帮助品牌加强生命力，加强内部组织的有效性,通过强调组织范围内员工参与品牌的积极性来加速品牌成长。像其他有进取心的组织一样，期望员工有主见，有上进心，能为自己的行为负责。因为他们追求组织的利益,而员工在组织里能够激励和自我调节，以便他们在日常行为表达中定义品牌的属性。促使员工对于项目品牌有更深的认知，完成员工品牌战略。通过员工品牌，员工需要吸收品牌认知，并对客户和其他组织有一定的项目品牌的认识，员工品牌的最终目标是让员工对品牌的认知合并到员工的自我概念中，这种自我认识为品牌变现力提供一种低调的动力，员工品牌是一种特定的身份监管组织，通过员工的定向开发自我形象和工作方向,被认定为管理定义的目标。
 

The Tactics Of Employee Branding Programs Marketing Essay
 

A new and improved model for the enterprising organization is being promoted by marketing consultants and executives. This new model, known as living the brand is advertised as strengthening an organization’s position in the competitive marketplace while enhancing internal organizational effectiveness, all by emphasizing organization-wide employee involvement in branding processes. Like other enterprising organizations that expect their employees to demonstrate initiative, self-reliance, and responsibility for their own actions as they pursue the organization's interests, employees at organizations that are living the brand are expected to motivate and regulate themselves so that they express in their everyday behavior the attributes that define the brand’s identity. To induce employees to project the brand’s identity, organizations engage in employee branding. Through employee branding, employees are expected to internalize the desired brand identity and to be motivated to project the brand’s identity to customers and other organizational constituents. The ultimate goal of employee branding is to have employees incorporate the brand’s identity attributes into their own self-concepts, so that self-concept related motives for provide an unobtrusive, unproblematic engine for brand-expressive behavior. Employee branding is a specific kind of identity regulation by an organization, through which employees are directed to develop self-images and work orientations that are deemed congruent with managerially defined objectives. Organizations attempt to influence how employees define themselves so that when employees express themselves at work they automatically make decisions that advance the organization’s goals. One common influence on employees’ self-definitions, and a well-known form of identity management in organizations, is organizational identification. Organizational identification is the ongoing process of linking one’s self-definition to the identity of the organization. It occurs through defining oneself as having the same attributes as those that define the organization and by experiencing a sense of personal connection with the organization. As employees identify with the organization, their interests become aligned with the organization’s interests because employees internalize the organization’s attributes, values and expectations as their own. Employee branding has a logic analogous to the logic of organizational identification. The goal is to induce employees to create a behavioral and psychological connection between themselves and the brand’s identity.

In many ways, employee branding is just like any other strategy through which organizations attempt to increase control by shaping employee identities and so it is problematic simply on those grounds. In addition, however, employee branding is a way that “marketing asserts itself as a dominant principle of organizing”. Employee branding is an internally-directed employee management program that takes its cues about how to define and create the ideal employee from the commercial practices of marketing. In order to assess whether employee branding is simply identity control in a new package or whether the assumptions it brings in from marketing create a different challenge for employees, organizational scholars need to look more closely at the practice and ethos of employee branding.

 

Although the potential benefits of employee branding have been advertised in a variety of managerially-oriented outlets, there has been little scholarly work to map out what employee branding really is, what it does, and what it assumes. To introduce organizational scholars to the issues involved in employee branding, I begin this essay by outlining some of the assumptions that undergird the enthusiasm of employee branding’s proponents. I describe the tactics and practices of employee branding to show how they differ in subtle ways from traditional employee socialization tactics. I draw on theories from marketing and organizational studies to define employee-brand identification, the psychological connection between the brand and the employee, and to develop a preliminary model of how employee branding programs could induce employee-brand identification.

 

Proponents of living the brand claim that “every employee should be involved in the care and nurturing of the brand”. They plainly state that employees must internalize the brand’s identity before they can project it to others. A brand is more than the name given to a product, service, or organization; it embodies a wholes set of physical and socio-psychological attributes and beliefs. Nurturing a brand requires attending to the brand’s identity, the tangible and intangible, functional and symbolic attributes that define the brand. Only recently have employees throughout the organization been expected to be involved in translating the abstract ideas of the brand into their everyday behaviors, decisions, attitudes and so on.

 

公司实践——Company Practices
 

At Volvo, employees use the brand identity to guide decisions that might even seem minor, such as creating the right “click sound” for the seatbelts. When every employee is involved in branding, the organization ought to be more effective at creating, sustaining and delivering upon the “brand promise”.

 

The UK sandwich chain, Pret A Manger. The recruitment process at Pret requires prospective employees that have made it through the interview process to work for one day in a Pret store. The employees of that store then make the final decision as to whether or not the prospective employee is hired or not. Why? Pret thinks this process not only ensures that employees have the “Pret” attitude, but also empowers existing employees. In the end, only about 20 percent of prospective employees make the cut. But the employees Pret has are indeed walking, talking brand ambassadors, part of the “Pret experience” that their customers have come to expect, and what gives them the edge over other High Street sandwich chains.

 

Procter and Gamble soap making technicians rotate through short stints answering the consumer 800-number feedback lines. Often, employees are encouraged to take the role of a consumer to experience how the brand identity is delivered.

 

Harley-Davidson employees must purchase their bikes from dealers, using the same procedures as non-employees, so that they know what it is like to be a customer and to interact with sales, shipping and customer service. These programs are intended to teach employees how customers experience the brand, so that employees can understand what customers expect of the brand and of the employees who represent the brand.

 

The idea that branding should be used on an organization’s employees is quite new. Employee branding programs are intended to impress brand attributes onto the work behavior of employees, who are then expected to infuse brand attributes throughout their work. Branded employees are expected to project the brand’s identity through all of their behavior, including their demeanor, appearance, and manner of interacting with customers. From a marketing perspective, behaviorally projecting the brand’s identity is known as “on- brand behavior”. From an organizational theory perspective, projecting the brand’s identity can be understood as brand identity work. Brand identity work is the range of individual activities intended to create, present, and sustain the appearance of being like the brand and projecting the brand’s identity. It is based on the construct of individual-level “identity work”, defined as the “range of activities that individuals engage in to create, present, and sustain personal identities that are congruent with and supportive of the self-concept”. Brand identity work includes behaviors, gestures, verbal statements, points of view, and emotions that reflect and project the brand’s identity attributes.

 

Although it is not uncommon for a subset of employees to engage in brand identity work when their formal organizational roles explicitly require them to represent the brand to customers, employee branding programs require every employee —those with customer contact and those without—to represent the brand through their personal behavior. Employee branding proponents argue that employees throughout the product creation chain need to engage in brand identity work because the behavior of each one is important for delivering an overall branded product. "Linkage research" that focuses on the relationship between internal organizations processes and customer satisfaction has shown that what employees experience in their work environment is correlated with the experiences they provide for customers. When employees with internal responsibilities and no direct contact with external stakeholders offer other employees “on brand behavior”, they provide important support to those who project the brand to external customers. “A company achieves its greatest advantage when employee actions and brand identity reinforce each other”.