So how do you get your people engaged and focused on mission, purpose, and vision? The first step is to approach your employees as a marketplace—a marketplace to sell your brand messages.

Think about it. Can you fathom gaining consumer brand loyalty by engraving a mission statement on a plaque and hanging it in the hallway of someone's house? Sounds ridiculous, right? Your employee marketplace is no different. Every good marketer knows you have to be far more engaging than that to merit brand connection and loyalty. What you want to do is sell your brand messages using the tools and techniques that ad agencies, design firms, and marketing companies use. The following are five steps that will move your static mission statements off your walls and "Evolve Your Workforce Into a Brandforce."

Step 1: Strip Down Your Brand Purpose Statement to a Few Words
This is a very useful exercise. In other words turn a long-winded mission statement into a mission tagline. The following taglines use just two or three words and yet inherent in them is the code by which you could run a whole organization. They are engaging, powerful and actionable. Timberland: Make it better. Nike: Just do it. Apple: Think different. Adidas: Impossible is nothing. Pedigree: Dogs rule. Adobe: Simplicity at work.

Following is a mini-story that will put light on how the editing down process might look. We were working on an internal brand communication project for Deutsche Bank. The division was a six-month-old startup called Maxblue. The founder, Manuel Meija conceived of a Latin American investment bank while staring out at white clouds in a blue sky from his airplane window on a flight back from Cannes, France.

When we asked Manuel what he thought the purpose of Maxblue was. He stated (I am paraphrasing): "To be a premier investment services institution offering top-tier financial products and services."

Now this sounded like plenty of mission statements hanging on walls of many financial firms. This kind of financial rhetoric would surely put to sleep the 200 young talented, culturally diverse employees that made up Maxblue. So we pushed him and said, "Come on, Manuel: where is the story? Why did you want to create an investment bank for the Latin American investor? He went on to say. "When I was young, my family did not have any money. When I went to a high school dance, I had to borrow a pair of dress shoes from my uncle. They were not in style but they were the only ones available to me. My parents worked very hard. They scrimped and saved in order for me to go to the best schools. They had big dreams for me. So I guess this is what I want to offer to the Latin American investor, a financial bank that helps them dream big."

Bingo! In explaining the origins of the idea he uncovered the magic. "Dream big" became the Maxblue tagline. It became the heart of why everyone showed up for work. It became the challenge to think up new products and services to help investors realize their dreams. It became the guide to frame the organization's principles and beliefs. The right two words can communicate a lot.

Step 2: Take The Brand Tagline And Find Inventive Ways To Deliver The Message
The communication theorist Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message." Open up your thinking to how you might reinforce your brand's message by how you deliver it. For example, imagine a really large, oversized, colorful ball that people could roll down the hallway in a corporate office space. On the ball is your company's brand position line. For now we will borrow, one of my favorites, "Adidas. Impossible is nothing." Imagine this line being rolled around. It puts the idea in motion, it opens up the creativity, it encourages a spirit of playfulness. All good things when it comes to getting people engaged.

In the case of Maxblue we put their line "Dream big" on pillowcases that had soft white clouds on a blue background. Remember Manuel Meija's first daydream out the plane window? Synergy helps in communicating brand messages. We gave a set of pillowcases to everyone in the company. Again, it served to draw on the whole metaphor of dreaming and the sky's the limit. Both of these examples point to ways in which people in organizations can experiencing and begin "living the brand."

Step 3: Use The Power Of Image To Amplify Your Message
Graphics, images, and icons amplify written communication. This is simply because as humans we have only been communicating with text for around 5,000 years—whereas image-based communication goes back 30,000 years. Our relationship to pictures, images, and other visual forms of communication deliver messages on a very deep level. Say you are an organization who is looking to foster the idea of peak performance in your culture. Okay, now see the words "Peak Performance" typed in the center of a plain white sheet of paper. Now imagine walking down a hallway where one whole wall has a blown up picture of Mt. Everest. The feeling of seeing this image with its awesome majestic peak reinforces the whole idea the culture is being asked to reach for.

Now let's try this with Apple. See the words "Think Different" centered on a white sheet of paper. Now go into a conference room and see images of the pop icons John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Miles Davis, Gandhi, Muhammad Ali, and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Again, these pop figures embody the spirit of thinking in ways that are new, fresh, and original. This is the core of Apple's brand philosophy.

Step 4: Never Underestimate the Power of Environment to Support the Brand
Adobe, the US$2 billion software maker, decided to turn its San Jose headquarters into the greenest corporate building on record in the US. It also retrofitted all its existing 151 office towers (about 1 million square feet) to the new green codes and specs. Talk about "living the brand"! Their corporate environment initiative may exceed many budgets but as an example it is totally worth the read.

Adobe's tagline is "Simplicity at work." The tagline conveys, in a simple and down-to-earth manner, its principles of being. So they looked through a "green lens" at every square inch of their corporate space and asked "Is this 'Simplicity at work'?" Here are some of the results:

• Bicycle and an $80 monthly subsidy to employees who don't drive to work; Funding a public park to create green open spaces around its campus, as well as local trails and gardens
• Internet-based watering system adjusting flow according to incoming weather data
• Motion light sensors in stairwells and freight alcoves for lights only when needed
• Incandescent bulbs throughout its offices with energy-efficient compact fluorescents
• Timers to reduce the operating hours of garage exhaust fans and outdoor lighting systems
• Sensor-based bathroom fixtures to help reduce water waste
• Waterless urinals
• Composting containers that hook onto trash cans to separate food waste from regular garbage

Now here is a look at a way to change in an environment that any budget could handle. I call it the "Benjamin Moore Effect." Here is how it worked for one of our clients. We were offsite with a financial group, helping them morph into their next culture. Everyone was going to have to get in step with this new change quickly, as financial markets change very rapidly. While we were at the offsite, we had arranged to have painters come in to their corporate space with two colors of Benjamin Moore paint. The gold and blue paint representing their corporate colors were painted on the columns in their office space in a pattern keyed to the mambo dance step.

Learning a new dance was the metaphor used for learning a new way of being. The following day everyone arrived at work to see the philosophy of this new cultural rhythm in living color in their office space. This gave them an immediate reference to what they all needed to align and get in step with. The budget for this was $500 worth of paint: simple, cheap, and very effective.

Step 5: Everything Communicates and Communication Is Everything
In communicating the mission of the brand, no thing is too small to consider. Howard Schultz, chairman and CEO of Starbucks, always said, "Retail is in the details." You create a robust brand by paying attention to how you communicate the brand beginning with your employees. One of the most powerful beliefs that Shultz always had was that his employees were his partners in creating the Starbucks brand. Shultz knows the value of investing in his Brandforce. Starbucks historically has always spent more on partner recruitment, development, and communication than it spends in consumer advertising.

While Starbucks does not release how much it spends on internal development, in fiscal 2005, the company spent $87.7 million on consumer advertising. This will give you an idea on the level of commitment they hold to this belief. Over time I have collected evidence of how clearly they communicate their brand. They know how to use graphics and images to set the context for their products and store environments. In fact they have a whole design departments dedicated to this function. If you walk into any Starbucks you will see how design plays out on the walls of its stores, the packaging of its products, the in-store communication pamphlets, plus the napkins, paper-cup holders, etc.

The Starbucks baristas, partners, and customers all share in this visually rich, aromatic coffee experience. This is part of why people pay more for a cup of joe at Starbucks. While the coffee is pricey, the brand has remained committed to social causes and awareness. The brand runs full-page ads with headlines like "Wake Up And Smell The Coffee," "Who Needs a Coffee Machine?," "Hope Springs From a Faucet," and Small Coffee Farms Don't Grow Small Coffee."

All of these ads are under Starbucks' What Makes Coffee Good social responsibility campaign. It is hard to come up with a better example of a brand that does such a consistent job communicating and living their brand. The return for being this dedicated is that Starbucks experiences the lowest employee-turnover rate of any company in the fast food sector. Because retention of employees goes hand-in-hand with retention of customers, it's no wonder that with each cup, the Starbucks brand continues to enrich our daily lives.

Brands That Have Brandforces Are Brands That Will Write Themselves Into the Future
Smart brands know that the future health of their organization is in the hands of their people. A Brandforce is a group of individuals who bring all they are to work for their company. Brandforces run on communication. It is the bridge that keeps the connection to employees vital, traverses change, and supports the brand vision into the future.

Workforces can be productive, but Brandforces build and create equity for the whole of the organization.

_________________
Patt Cottingham is a brand communication strategist and speaker living in the US. workforcetobrandforce.com and genuineimprints.com.