IDG is a HUUUUGE company; in fact, it states on its website that it is the world’s largest media tech company. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and you know what else? IDG also had a brand culture problem. It was so big that the individual business units were silos. We’ve heard about silos before, right? Apparently, IDG had never hired a chief marketing officer which is highly interesting for such a massive global corporation.
The company decided to relaunch the brand to better inform customers about what else was available throughout the company, and in order to do so, it had to align its brand culture with all internal stakeholders.
The very first step taken by IDG was to research. This is ALWAYS the first step to take to find all of the problems and to then apply strategy to solve them.
Brand Ambassadors Are Employees
When you think of the best way to get out the word internally for a massive culture shift like the one IDG underwent, the C-suite has to also think of who’s the best messenger for the message, too.
My pal, Daniel Hebert works at Post Beyond, and that company is using employee networks to push social media deeper and farther across social channels using employees’ networks. Pretty neat, eh? You can listen to my interview with Daniel right here. He was our guest on The Heart of Marketing podcast.
In our culture series on The Heart of Marketing we explore how culture aligns with brand and mission, vision, and values. There is one particular episode that’s really popular, and you can listen to it here.
So, back to IDG.
It had splintered messaging, and how cool is it that employees could be the ones to push the proper branded message to other employees?
So, IDG selected some influential employees who were not of the marketing department. They were trained in the IDG culture, they understood the brand and the brand strategy, they were given first dibs on new and unlaunched information, and they embraced their role as a representative of the company tasked with a very important job.
The re-launch was a big success. The IDG grassroots approach was the secret sauce.
Align Culture With Brand
That’s a mouthful when you think about it. The first introspective look at your company needs to be about culture. Understanding culture paves the way for branding. Once you get to know your cultural perspective, then you can implement a branding campaign first with internal stakeholders and then with external audiences. The very best way to ensure success of culture branding is to engage and build relationships with employees. Once you have that relationship on board and vibrant, then the rest flows.
Listen to Heart of Marketing Podcast
IDG and its Brand to Culture Alignment
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