An ex-colleague that has joined L'Oreal dropped me an email about how they offer employees a chance to buy many of the premium and luxury brands that the company sells in the run-up to Christmas.While the point he was making was that the calibre of staff merchandise sales was somewhat sexier and dramatic versus our more mainstream lines, it made me think more about how as marketers we often tend to forget the importance and opportunity to tap into our employees. We see them as employees rather than consumers and potential brand ambassadors, recommenders and users.
There are around 90 000 employees of J&J. So once you take into account their direct families (not even their friends and relations) I guess we are up to a minimum of say 270000 consumers. And yet we do not have an internal marketing and sampling program to generate awareness and trial of new products and leading products. We do have in most cases staff sales of products, but that tends to be what the company directly sells than the broader portfolio in that country.
I wonder why we have not tapped more pro-actively into our internal consumers and in this day of the growing importance of word-of-mouth and recommendation we have not done more. Something for me to get on with I think!
What do other companies do? Are there any that do this well and have great success with it?
1 comment:
Gary - delighted you raised this subject. I always consider that when building a successful business we build 4 brands - the corporate brand, the product brand, the employer brand and the personal brand of the leaders in the business.
I've certainly implemented specific programmes for employees both in terms of brand education and then providing them with opportunities to sample products. Don't forget that you can have your employees to help you when in the research phase for focus groups.
Your employees can and should be some of your strongest brand advocates and brand ambassadors. consider the massive sales force you have if you tap into all of your employees being brand ambassadors.
Take a look at what Apple did for example when they launched the iPhone letting their employees have access to the phones a considerably reduced price.
Many companies also have staff discount programmes in place and staff shops where there is a consumer product and those programmes can be integrated into your employee brand ambassador programme.
There is a huge opportunity for the marketing team and the HR function to collaborate in this area.
Do however take advice from your compensation and benefits team as these discount programmes as you mentioned in the case of L'Oreal can be considered as a benefit in kind in terms of the Inland Revenue so you need to ensure you get the benefit in kind element squared away with your tax office.
Best wishes
Krishna De
context Bringing Your Brand To Life!
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