An important issue facing companies when dealing with their employees and persuading them to follow defined actions, especially when making difficult decisions such as redundancies, is to maintain integrity of the internal marketing communications.

Sonja Roberts, head of Barclays Card Services (BCS) Communications and Marketing Change at Barclaycard, is a firm believer in the honest approach. Barclaycard has, since the early 1990s, been driving change in its operations through its Living the Brand programme. During the late 1990s, the bank went through a major business change programme, which forced it to marry job losses with brand values.

Under these conditions, according to Roberts, ‘Transparency is key. It takes a lot of commitment from the top. It's no good my going around saying those at the top are committed. The way it worked for us was to get senior people on the road supporting events so that what we have now is woven all through the business strategy.’

Barclaycard started the Living Brand initiative in 1995, as a vehicle to actively spread brand focus throughout the business. The Living the Brand programme put every single person through a series of workshops and activities. The logic behind these sessions was to build brand awareness, understanding, commitment and action.

The aim was to get employees thinking about the brand generally and then think about Barclaycard and where the company wanted to take it. After that, the bank developed and ran numerous more workshops, with each one carefully targeted at different audiences across the business. Within a period of a few years, the entire business was covered about two to three times, with workshops tailored according to the segment group: senior managers, back office, front line and so on.

In addition to enlisting and making ‘visible’ senior management commitment to keep the initiative alive when things were not going smoothly, Barclay's found that it was important to track and measure success. While to some extent there had to be a certain amount of blind faith, since it is very difficult to pinpoint the precise impact of internal marketing, BCS developed a brand tracking system to try to gauge what affects the brand and what does not. This information was considered vital enough for board members to scrutinize it every month.

One of the worst mistakes companies make is to mouth the right words but take little action. Unfortunately, there is a lot of that around, with many corporations simply making glib statements about how open, accessible, listening and caring they are toward their employees. What is worse than not being open, honest and not caring about your employees’ views is saying you are and not reflecting it in action. In such instances, it is far better to just keep quiet. Success in this sector is very firmly rooted in the skills, capabilities and motivation of employees. In Roberts’ words: ‘I have seen, over the course of my career, the issue of how you deal with your staff becoming more and more critical. There are other important assets, of course: we know that our data, for example, is a very important asset. But at the end of the day, it is our people that make the difference, whether they are the people manipulating the data or talking to customers. You can't be in this business unless you have effective customer service. The real differentiation comes from customer contact. And we have more than 10 million customer service calls a year – that's 10 million potential opportunities for building relationships.’

Source: Mazur, L. (1999). Unleashing employees’ true value: employees can be your company's most valuable marketing asset. Marketing, April, 22–4.