Strengthening culture to maintain brand momentum – Part I: Employee choice
A brand’s momentum—a measure of its ranking within its category combined with future purchase intent—is typically considered the responsibility of marketing and customer-facing teams. In reality, we know a brand’s momentum is also inextricably tied to culture and employee experience.
The brand is the meaning-making engine in an organization, connecting the company, its customers, and its employees. While a strong external brand perception is necessary, brands will struggle to reach or sustain category leadership without the strength that comes from the internal core. Failure to leverage the passion of an organization’s people is a failure to realize its full potential. If you can successfully activate employee believers and align them with the brand’s promise, you’ll see improvement in retention, recruiting, productivity, and so much more.
In this series, we’ll explore how you can unlock the full power of employee experience as a driver of brand momentum. For sustained category leadership, both challenger brands (brands disrupting a category) and incumbent brands (brands currently taking up the most market share) must consistently take proactive steps to strengthen their organizational culture. What brought a brand success in the past will rarely be enough to sustain it in the future. As employees become more empowered to choose where, how, when, and for whom they work, companies must keep a constant pulse on workforce dynamics. Those that craft a differentiated and compelling employee experience will be best positioned to maintain their competitive edge.
Avoiding culture complacency
As tempting as it is for incumbents to focus on mitigating threats to their customer relationships, they must also protect who got them to incumbent status in the first place: their employees. When an incumbent brand develops a strategy to stay on top, it must keep in mind the challengers attracting the A players with innovative employee experiences.
The Pixar-Disney acquisition is a prime example of an incumbent brand being willing to take on an innovative challenger culture. Pixar, known for its candid and creative culture, faced a potential clash when acquired by the more corporate and traditional Disney. However, Disney’s leadership chose to adopt Pixar’s cultural strengths, recognizing those unique strengths were more relevant to what the progressive talent market demanded than to what had made Disney successful in the past. As a result, Disney was able to expand its content portfolio, reach wider audiences, and fuel significant growth. Incumbent brands like Disney must constantly reconsider their employee experience to influence employee engagement and choice.
The era of employee choice
Beginning in the early 2000s, the gig economy and a war for talent in the tech industry set the stage for a shift in how we view employment. However, it was the Great Resignation, spurred by the pandemic, which truly reshaped the employment landscape. I prefer to label the epoch as the Era of the Empowered Employee—a realization at scale options previously unavailable were now within reach. This newfound freedom of choice was largely facilitated by advancements in technology, particularly the untethering effect of smartphones and liberation from widespread connectivity redefining how we experience employment.
The concept of choice, once limited to gig and shift workers like Uber drivers and restaurant servers, has expanded to encompass a vast array of roles and income levels. Many employees no longer need to be physically present in an office to be engaged and productive. Even employees who are required to work on-site have been presented with more options for scheduling their shifts, taking time off, skill-building, and other choices that ladder up to feelings of empowerment. Recent research by Harvard Business Review has uncovered the driving factor behind worker satisfaction: how much control over their time workers feel they have. Regardless of work arrangement or industry, companies must take the employees’ expanded choices into consideration when creating their Employee Value Proposition.
The role of Employee Value Propositions (EVPs) in employee choice
If you don’t tell your company’s story to your current and future employees, someone else will. An Employee Value Proposition (EVP) encapsulates the value of working at an organization for employees and candidates. Developing an EVP enables your organization to understand what sets you apart as an employer, where the gaps are (compared to competitors and to employees’ and candidates’ needs and wants), and where to invest in closing those gaps. When employees and candidates engage with communications rooted in the EVP, they gain consistent and authentic information and data points to help them make important decisions for their future (ideally with your company!).
A strong and well documented EVP is mission-critical because candidates rarely base their employment choices solely on industry. You’re not competing with just your industry for talent— you’re competing with everyone. If I’m a data analyst, I could work in big tech. Or I could work at Chewy, a pet products company that has rebranded its employer identity to be a technology company which serves pets and pet owners. Chewy saw an opportunity to enter this space and transformed its culture and EVP to align with the values and preferences of top tech talent. This is just one example of new options coming across the radar of employees.
But what about customers?
Investing in employee experience and customer experience are not mutually exclusive—they are complementary and mutually reinforcing. Research consistently shows engaged, satisfied employees are more likely to deliver superior customer service, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Companies that provide meaningful work, a positive and clear culture, efficient digital tools and processes, and career development often see a direct, positive impact on customer interactions. Engaged employees are likely to be more attentive and empathetic, creating memorable and positive experiences for customers.
There’s a lot at stake for customers if employees are put on the back burner. When dissatisfied employees leave, the turnover not only increases recruitment and training costs but also disrupts service quality, negatively affecting Cx measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score. If an employee stays but is disengaged due to culture or friction, reports estimate they could cost the company about 34% of their annual salary in productivity losses or $1.9 Trillion nationally, which will negatively affect the customer experience.
Making the employee decision a no-brainer
Maintaining brand momentum in 2024 and beyond requires a constant reevaluation of the employee experience around four key themes I will touch on in upcoming articles: agility, autonomy, care, and purpose. In this age of empowered employees, a company’s culture cannot just be another facet of the business—culture must become integral to the strategy. By prioritizing and defining your internal culture, you will create a resilient foundation to support sustained brand momentum.
Want to dive deeper into Brand Momentum? Check out the Liquid X Avasta Challenger Index.
Modern businesses need modern measurement tools. Liquid Agency and Avasta developed the Challenger Index based on the realization that past practices and historical performances are not the best indicators of future growth. Today’s complex, high-stakes business environment demands a new approach and new thinking. The index offers strategic insights for both B2B and B2C sectors, while offering a nuanced understanding of how brands behave and markets operate. It redefines the metrics of business achievement and offers executives a detailed and comprehensive view of brands’ standings and potential in the market.
