A traditional measure of employee brand engagement is a net promoter score taken from a quantitative survey where you ask employees how likely they would be to recommend the brand to others.
However, there’s another way that can help guide employee brand engagement efforts to actually create more brand champions to drive the business forward. This approach measures employees’ brand knowledge with specific questions about the brand, such as knowing what it stands for, and how committed they are to the brand and what it stands for.
With this methodology from Siegel + Gale, employees fall into four categories.
- Brand champions: High knowledge + high commitment
- Apprentices:Low knowledge + high commitment
- Skeptics:High knowledge + low commitment
- Disengaged:Low knowledge + low commitment
Apprentices are the low-hanging fruit for conversion to brand champions. Identifying where those apprentices are by geography or line of business, for example, can help target more learning activities to bolster their knowledge. Increasing opportunities for learning also impacts the knowledge measure for the disengaged.
Increasing commitment is a harder metric to move because lack of brand commitment can be caused by many things. But for a corporate brand, making more employees aware of pride-evoking reasons can help. For example, when SAP published a one-minute video announcing our ranking as the No. 26 top global brand in Interbrand’s annual report, one employee wrote, “Congrats. Let’s enter into the top 15 next year.”
In one year, with our brand engagement and enablement efforts, we increased the number of brand champions in marketing by 31 percentage points and the number of apprentices by 11 percentage points.
As Gallup exhorts, “You must arm your employees with the knowledge and resources they need to be effective brand ambassadors. They must know what your organization stands for and what makes it different from others in the marketplace; (they must) understand your brand promise and be able to explain the most important elements of your brand identity…”
Without engaged, knowledgeable and committed employee brand champions, even the best strategy alone can’t drive the business. This measurement approach can you help you tailor and target your brand engagement and enablement efforts to foster more.
