Live the brand.
When you do it,
you have to live it. It has to
occupy that space in your
employees’ minds, too. It cannot be a sham.
If you’re going to sell it to
somebody, it better be real.
And if it’s real, then you better
be willing to live it. So we try
and instill it in all of our
employees.
Bring it back up every meeting you have, with newsletters,
with personal statements, that
they see [what] I’m doing. If I
can’t convince my employees
that it’s the right thing, then
I’m probably going to have a
hard time convincing the public. If you can get your people
to believe it, then they’ll get
the public to believe it.
Involve your employees.
I’ve got
to [have] 80 percent or more
of the employees behind it. It’s
not even a 50-50 deal. You
can’t have 49 percent of the
company. It’s a consensus.
We operate on the philosophy that you believe in what
you’re doing. And when you
don’t believe that, then my
door’s always open. You come
up and tell me why you don’t
believe it.
Sometimes I have to listen,
and sometimes they listen.
‘Well, I understand it costs us
money, but this is where we’re
going because it’s the right
thing to do and because I feel
better when I come to work
and I do this.’ That’s branding
to the core, is people come to
work and they do it because
they think it’s the right thing to
do and they feel good about
doing it.
It’s important to allow it to
be their idea. I brought out a
suggestion that we should start going green and what did
they think and what did they
see that we could do. The
ideas started flying, so we’re
changing light bulbs and doing
all this stuff that was mostly
other people’s ideas.
I think the other part of that
is to communicate back again
and say, ‘Here were six great
ideas, three of which we found
we could implement now, and
these three — while they’re all
good ideas — we can’t do
them now because … .’
It’s to gauge the overall
response but also to get buyin. We have a suggestion box,
but you don’t have to do that.
You just e-mail it or whatever.
Oftentimes, some of the best
ideas come from (employees)
who don’t necessarily get them
out in an open forum.
HOW TO REACH: Meridian Mark Management, www.meridianmarkmanagement.com or (513) 575-0100
