Avvio - The award winning Brand Engagement Agency. Leading specialist in engaging and marketing to internal, business, technical and consumer audiences. Clients include Vodafone, Sky and Cisco.

Engaging your employees with your brand

It’s a familiar story. A company invests millions of pounds every year marketing their products and raising the profile of their brand. They employ the best planners, the smartest creative people and the finest brains in their organisation to create a campaign that they hope will strike a chord with every potential customer.Then once their campaign is under way the company waits in eager anticipation for the sales figures. But the numbers aren’t what they were hoping for. It seems they’ve forgotten one vital ingredient and it just happens to be the most important key to their brands success: their employees. Employees make brands workThe simple truth is for a brand to be successful and achieve customer buy-in you need employees to buy-in first. Duncan Gardner and James Norrington, Managing Director and Creative Director of the internal comms agency Avvio believe this is the most important component of building a successful brand. “Getting the message across to the workforce and getting them engaged with the brand is vital. Ad agencies can dream up these fantastic customer promises but at the end of the day it’s down to the employees to make them work.”Gardner and Norrington have spent many years helping clients engage their brands with their workforce. Today, Avvio works with clients like Sky, Vodafone, Centrica and RBS to help their widely different workforces understand and connect with their brand. “In a sense you ‘sell’ your brands promise to your employees” says James Norrington. “It’s getting employees to love the brand, so they reflect this passion back to the customers and also their co-workers”.Branding is one of today’s most overused buzzwords. Everyone is talking about it because in today’s competitive market it’s the most important ingredient for success. The strength of your brand depends how well you can align the people and the processes behind it. And building alignment is hard work! But once you’ve organised your brand strategy you can use it to focus on operational procedures, human resources, employee loyalty, CSR and the increasingly important area of environmental messaging.Using the brand for environmental communicationsWith environmental issues gaining more headline inches then ever and consumers becoming more aware of their environmental responsibilities, there is increasing need for environmental departments to work more closely with marketing and corporate communications to ensure that the right messages are being spread about their brand. At Avvio there has been a noticeable rise in the amount CSR and environmental messages that are going out to workforces and Duncan Gardner has seen his agency become one of the specialists in the field. “Obviously clients are looking to make changes and reduce the impact they make on the environment. In recent months our team have built carbon calculators for employees to work out their own individual footprints, we’ve built websites with virtual aquariums that draw employees back every day, and we’ve launched a programme that gets employees bringing their old mobile phones into the office for recycling. The goal is to transform employees into mini environmentalists so they understand the issues, engage with the brand values and spread the word.”Avvio themselves have made some impressive steps towards reducing their own carbon footprint and plans are in place for the agency to be powered by wind turbine. As Duncan Gardner explains, “our offices are unusual in that we work in the middle of a rural area, and the wind across our neighbouring fields can get up strong, we’re also interested in supporting new ideas and this makes a lot of sense.” Communicating to employees during a mergerTo achieve the growth they need, many business leaders go looking for additional resources armed with nothing more than a cheque book. One of the problem of buying a company you need is there’s a good chance you’ll also be acquiring quite a few anxious employees. Who can blame them feeling concerned, just a few days before they were happy in the knowledge that their career was going just as they planned. They identified with their company and understood their role. Then suddenly, everything’s up in the air.That’s why a well-executed internal communications plan is so vital. The messages that make up the plan not only encourage all employees to work together but also help them understand their role, the vision of the company and give individuals the chance to play their part. As James Norrington explains, “The best employee communication is all about communicating the right things in the right way and in a way that will build trust between the company and the employee. Communications that simply ‘happen’ rarely achieve the results that you’re looking for”www.avvio.co.uk

Specialist Services

Build and design intranets, websites, web banners, e-mail blasts. Video and film scriptwriting and production. Traditional 2d graphic design and illustration. Events staging and production. Copywriting.

Trade Bodies / Associations

Member of the IAB. Dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace. Member of Melcrum.

Trading Since

1992