The Power of Brands!

The dictionary defines the term "brand" as a "mark or label of identification, grade, etc. on merchandise; a trademark; hence, the kind or make of a commodity." In marketing, the meaning goes one step further to include the reputation of a company, because a brand has no value unless it's held in high esteem.

The New Brand Medium

The dictionary defines the term "brand" as a "mark or label of identification, grade, etc. on merchandise; a trademark; hence, the kind or make of a commodity." In marketing, the meaning goes one step further to include the reputation of a company, because a brand has no value unless it's held in high esteem.

The most desirable brands have so much value that other companies want to associate themselves with them, either by offering that brand as an incentive, recognition or reward, or in some form of co-marketing program in which companies work together to reinforce each other's brands.

People Delivering Promises

Advertising and marketing agencies would like us to believe that a brand can be created through marketing – an effective logo, great advertising campaign and clever promotions – and it's true that these techniques play an important role. Product and service creators, on the other hand, would have us believe that it's the product or service that truly defines the brand, such as a great line of highly reliable automobiles appropriately priced and designed with features that appeal to their target audience, or an overnight delivery company that reliably delivers when it says it will. Again, no one can argue with that.

But in their never-ending focus on processes, organizations leave out one other critical component of a great brand – the people who deliver its promises.

People contribute to brands every step of the way. It starts with customers who become loyal and so convinced about the quality of a brand that they tell their friends or business colleagues. Many businesspeople will tell you that much of their business comes via word-of-mouth, and it's only natural. Finding high quality products and vendors is a never-ending quest, and people regularly help one another by sharing good resources.

Salespeople, of course, make a major contribution to the brand, often positively, sometimes negatively. Effective advertising often draws people into retail showrooms, only to encounter indifferent or uninformed salespeople whose behavior and service run completely counter to the promises implied. Conversely, customer-focused salespeople eager to find solutions for customers can have so much power that they may negate the need for much advertising at all. Take Mary Kay Cosmetics, which has virtually built its business without advertising, or more recently, YouTube.

When people like something, they tell their friends.

Equally important: channel partners. Every insurance company, financial services firm or manufacturer that sells through brokers, distributors, retailers, etc., confronts the challenge of having channel partner salespeople who can deliver the promises they make in their advertising. Billions are spent on marketing, training and incentive programs to somehow move the needle with the millions of salespeople representing multiple lines who are often overwhelmed by efforts to get their attention.

No less critical: employees. From the people who answer the phone – or the automated systems often standing in their way – to the janitor on the shop floor whose failure to properly clean something could yield a defect in multiple products, employees contribute as much as anyone to how people perceive our brands.

Brands as Media

Almost any organization can leverage the power of other brands to make a statement about their own brand, draw attention to their external or internal marketing messages, motivate opt-in to receive communications, refer new customers, make repeat purchases, motivate channel partners and employees to perform, etc. By appealing to specific demographics, brands make a statement that resonates with specific target audiences. Brands can enhance the perceived value of an award and help draw attention to whatever message you're trying to get across.

Brands can also be used in cooperative or joint promotions, in which two or more organizations leverage each other's brands for mutual benefit. These applications can include affinity programs in which one brand offers discounts to customers of other brands; loyalty programs where select brands provide rewards for mutual customers; and sweepstakes, contests or charitable promotions in which complimentary brands participate in order to boost marketing resources, appeal and impact.

Specialized incentive and marketing companies have expertise using brands as promotions, incentives, rewards and recognition, or in co-marketing programs, and they can offer the complete range of services necessary to profit from the New Brand Medium.

Is Your Brand an Incentive?

The most powerful, desirable brands not only have appeal in their marketplaces, but are so desirable that other companies want to use them in their incentive, promotions or rewards and recognition system. Being able to sell your brand into this marketplace is a rare mark of distinction, since it means that your product or service is not only desirable, it also motivates.

Take a fresh look at your organization's brand from your customer's perspective. Try to identify the unique selling benefits your marketing messages or sales force convey and realistically assess if your organization consistently delivers. Conduct a survey of your employees to find out if they're even aware of what your marketing and sales campaigns promise, or how what they do can have an impact on the perception of that brand. Determine if you've taken advantage of all of the word-of-mouth opportunities that are available in the Internet age to get customers and/or employees to spread the word.

In addition, step back and look at your marketing – to consumers, salespeople, channel partners and employees – and assess to what extent you really have broken through the communications clutter. Have they engaged? Do they get it? Does your marketing motivate people to sign up to receive ongoing communications from you on a permission basis? Do a reasonable percentage read and respond? Marketing campaigns that include brands as prizes, rewards or promotions can resonate with your target audience, improve perceived value, create buzz, help you stand out from the crowd and make a statement about your company's own brand. Brands make for an important weapon in the arsenal of any type of communications or engagement effort with almost any type of audience.

The objective is to think of your own brand as a marketing tool. You spend a considerable sum on advertising, direct marketing, trade shows or even salespeople to get more business. Have you considered all the highly targeted ways to get your brand in front of the customer, even when your salespeople cannot – i.e., through a strategically selected promotional product? And what about the ultimate opportunity: Can your brand itself be an incentive for other companies to use in their arsenals?

Taking the Next Step

The toolkit for building great brands through people exists and is well documented by the Forum for People Performance Management & Measurement. The collective research indicates that there are several good reasons why companies neglect the connection between brands and people. For one, it's a challenge. Fostering this type of focus on the brand requires a focus on customers and people alien to the "process orientation" of many CEOs. It also requires a breakdown of organizational silos. And let's face it, aligning the actions of people across an organization is far more complicated than aligning the actions of a machine or business process. To tackle this challenge takes inspired leadership starting at the top and fostered throughout the entire organization. Only those CEOs who see the connection to financial results will have the necessary fortitude.

Intrigued? Go to http://www.performanceforum.org to find out why this subject is gradually gaining ground and what's involved in taking your brand to the next level by leveraging "the power of people."

Take Advantage of the Power of the Brand

There's no doubt that brands are powerful – and that the power and influence of brands in the consumer marketplace has spilled over into the incentive marketplace. Whether one is talking recognition programs, incentive programs or consumer promotions, the use of branded products will increase participation, redemption and results.

"From our standpoint, if we're looking at branded versus generic items, I can't think of too many reasons not to use a branded product if one is available," says Bruce Hollander, Executive Vice President of Don Jagoda Associates.

In consumer promotions, for instance, "using an established brand in your promotion has a halo effect that makes your product, your service – whatever you're trying to promote – look better. Your product or service becomes associated with all the goodwill that brand has built up over the years, with all of the positive feelings your audience has for that brand," says Hollander. "Using the right branded product and piggybacking on its immediate audience recognition in a promotion can give your program and product credibility and desirability. Sometimes you can even make it seem bigger than it is."

The same applies to incentive and recognition programs. "In recognition programs as in incentive programs, you want to recognize your winners – particularly employees and channel partners – as people who have excelled in some dimension," says Rodger Stotz, Vice President & Managing Consultant at Maritz. "And you want to create a connection with top brands to make them feel special."

Conversely, providing generic rewards and treating employees or channel partners as if brands didn't matter creates an obvious disconnect. "If you're trying to be a top-flight company and have individuals stand out and be recognized as top performers, it's hard to do that without looking at the brands you're selecting to be part of that recognition and reward process," says Stotz.

Most people want to align themselves with brands that have a high perceived value," adds Norma Jean Knollenberg, CEO of Top Brands. "And most companies look for brands that are aligned with their own brand values."

Consumer Crossover

The importance of brands in the incentive marketplace is essentially an extension of the power and importance of brands in the consumer marketplace. "We're seeing in the marketplace that consumers have put value in brands, and we see key brands attracting and holding value," says Stotz. "Well, participants in incentive and recognition programs are also consumers, so they carry with them this perception of brand value. We can't expect program participants to react differently than consumers, because they're both consumers and participants."

The more "sophisticated" end-users understand how to use brands to make an impression with specific demographic groups, says Knollenberg. "Identifying the demographics of the target audience is a basic step in planning a program or a promotion. And once the audience is identified, most end-users know the value of offering brands that will motivate that audience to achieve program objectives."

This wasn't necessarily the case a few years ago. "Ten years back, people weren't as brand-savvy as they are today," says Dana Slockbower, Director of Marketing at Rymax Marketing Services. "Now there's much more brand awareness. They know there's a difference between a Toshiba and an electronics company they've never heard of. People want the latest and the greatest – they want trendy brand-name merchandise."

If you take a close look at the most commonly redeemed items in the typical incentive or recognition program, you'll find the most popular items are also the most popular consumer brands. That's just what Michael C. Fina Company discovered. In a study of 2.5 million employees and over 2500 individual award selections from employee non-cash recognition programs over the five years from 2002 through 2006, the company identified 100 top consumer brand names, as well as the top 10 consumer brands in 11 product categories.

"The core value we found," says Edward Ford, Michael C. Fina's Senior Vice President of Total Recognition, "is that employees see value in brands, and they don't see that same value in non-branded products." In fact, Ford says, his company will regularly accept the challenge of putting its slate of branded products up against recognition programs that use mostly non-branded merchandise. "We just did this with a major hospital with 20,000 employees," he says, "and employees chose our selections 87% of the time."

Michael C. Fina is so convinced that top consumer brands are the key to a successful recognition program that it doesn't bother much with digging into participant demographics, age variations, regional differences or other audience profile factors. "As long as you have the most popular brands overall," Ford says, "your program will appeal to every employee in your organization."

Dana Slockbower, on the other hand, believes that it's still important to understand your demographics and be able to profile your clientele, customers or employees, but she ties it back to their behavior as consumers. "You want to conduct surveys, brainstorming sessions and collect any type of feedback so you can understand what people would buy as everyday consumers," she says. "Once you understand their consumer behavior, then you can understand a little more about their reward behavior – including what they normally wouldn't purchase for themselves."

The Unstated Brand Promise

"There's always a temptation, if a client is looking at the budget, to go for the less expensive, non-brand item," says Hollander. "And not only do we have to explain to the client that you're losing the perceived value of the brand, the trophy value, but you're also running the risk of buying an 'XYZ' plasma TV or entertainment center and having it not function."

"It's a problem that people don't think about often enough," Hollander says. "They say, 'Oh, a TV is a TV – the guy's going to be happy that he won a TV.' But if I have it in my den and my friends are coming over to watch the football game, I'm going to feel a lot better if it's a brand-name TV than some off-brand that nobody has ever heard of and that probably won't perform as well." And if there is a problem, he adds, "your whole program can go down the drain."

Brand product quality is one of the leading benefits that clients report in follow-up surveys conducted by Rymax. "We have a very high product retention rate," Slockbower says, "meaning things don't come back damaged and defective. That's where we find a lot of the value in the top brands. The person receiving it enjoys the experience of this reward for a long period of time, and they don't have to deal with any of the hassles of it breaking down." And, she adds: "Once someone has this kind of positive experience with a product, that spreads by word of mouth."

On the other hand, even a moderately high product return rate can quickly scuttle an incentive program. "You can figure on return rates of 5% or 10% on non-brand items," says Ford. "It's less than 2% on all brand items. Our catalog of leading brand products has a return rate of 0.54% – the best in the industry."

Maximizing Brand Impact

While marketers and end-users are growing easier to convince of the importance of using brands in their promotions and incentives, they still need help in understanding how to use them effectively. One of the ways that companies can take better advantage of brands to improve the success of their programs is through more effective communication.

"End-users need to better understand the demographics of their participants and then align the brands that speak to that demographic as examples of the awards they can earn," says Stotz. "With incentive programs, for instance, keeping participants aware of what they can earn through ongoing communications and promotion is a very necessary and effective way to drive results. The more those brands that are desirable are highlighted and connect with the participant, the greater the impact is going to be."

Hollander agrees. "Use brands, use them as often as possible, and make sure that people know that you're using them," he says, adding that one of the worst things you can do is have a "secret promotion." "If people don't know about the promotion, if you don't communicate the terrific prizes that participants can win and what they have to do to win them in a clear and concise manner, that's a secret promotion," he explains.

Another option with branded products, says Hollander, is to add overlays. "It's very easy to take a basic incentive program that's got these terrific branded items and pull out one of the 'super dream items' and make it a sweepstakes prize. Do a 'program learning' sweepstakes where everyone has to [prove they understand] what they have to do to earn points. Or do a signup sweepstakes. Or maybe you want to do 'sales sprints' because some months are slow or some products aren't moving well – do a sweepstakes for a month where every sale you make not only earns program points but gives you another chance at the big-brand home entertainment center."

Brand impact even applies to travel incentives, says Stotz. "When we give incentive travel program participants and non-participants a chance through a research-based process to make tradeoffs in travel program preferences, we find they would rather spend three or four nights at a luxury brand five-star hotel than stay at a three-star hotel for five or six nights."

Hollander puts the brand benefit argument in perspective: "It really makes the difference. It says a lot about your program that you're using brand-name items. And most likely you're going to prevent quality problems down the road that you might run into with off-brand items," he notes.

The only argument that I ever get from clients about brands is that they can't afford it, that they don't have the budget," Hollander says. "And my argument is, 'You can't afford not to do it. It doesn't make sense to go to your best people or your best channel partners and not offer them the best products – or the best perceived products – out there. Let's find a way to make this work.'"

Branding, People and Social Capital

We can no longer treat internal and external branding as if they are different things...the brand is the entire system, of which employees and customers are a part. Brands are people and the connections between them. Even if we're talking about a product like an iPod, we're still talking about people having a sense of belonging to the iPod community, sharing playlists, evangelizing to non-participants, etc. As [Stormhoek Marketing Strategist] Hugh MacLeod says, "Branding is a spiritual exercise, and the market for something to believe in is infinite." We want to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves.

Think about your business ecosystem, including all employees, departments, outsourced labor, partners, stockholders, etc. This is your social capital. This is the singular energy that powers your business. Is it strong or weak? How connected is everyone? Do they feel like they're part of a big community of shared interests? Or are they isolated in stagnant clusters of matter that experience friction and resistance? It's time to open up. Be transparent. Reach out. Drop the walls. Stop trying to control every conversation. Permit creative chaos. Allow customers to talk to anyone in the company, not just to the guy sitting in a call center on the other side of the world. Form more connections, stronger connections, between every element in the system. When we acknowledge and maximize the power of social capital, our world becomes a powerful place.

©2005 by Jennifer Rice, Prophet Management Consulting, Founder of Mantra Brand Consulting, in her blog, What's Your Brand Mantra? For more information, go to http://brand.blogs.com/

Living in the Lap of Luxury (Brands)

How do consumers define luxury? According to a recent survey of international consumers by the Consumer Research Center of the Conference Board, "luxury is having enough time to do whatever you want and being able to afford it."

When the luxury of time is translated into terms of favorite pursuits, however, the study finds that high-tech activities, such as using a personal computer, the Internet or a cell phone, rank as top luxury activities, followed very closely by travel.

Those high-tech favorites correlate nicely with the results of a recent Luxury Brands Survey by Rymax Marketing. When asked to name the "most rewarding award categories for upscale products," survey participants identified the top three as:

• Electronics
• Jewelry/watches
• Cameras

In addition, the attribute that most participants identified as determining a luxury brand was not cost or price, but quality.

Including luxury brands in an incentive program can be a great way to dress it up and give participants something to stretch for – believing that if they just work a little harder they might have a shot at earning that high-quality, luxury item. But incentive end-users should also make sure the luxury item fits the demographics and profile of your participants.

But don't let your luxury item become the be-all and end-all of your program, says Dana Slockbower, Director of Marketing for Rymax. "You need to have quality branded products at price points for everyone," she says. "Some people will be driven by that aspirational luxury item they can work towards, but others need to feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return."

It becomes demotivating, in fact, "to offer rewards that cannot be reached," says Norma Jean Knollenberg of Top Brands, "regardless of the brand or the perceived luxury value of the brand."

A Wealth of New Research on How Brands Work

A number of organizations took advantage of the synergy and community interest at this year's Motivation Show in Chicago by announcing research findings highlighting the incentive industry's increasing growth and how that affects brands and branding. The release of the Incentive Federation's Travel and Merchandise Incentive Study shows that $46.1 billion was spent on brand-name incentive merchandise and travel in 2006. That's a big increase from the just under $30 billion figure that was reported in the Federation's last survey in 2000. In addition, the Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) announced its findings on the size and scope of the overall market for incentive travel, motivational meetings and special events, while research and recommendations from the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement examined the discipline of people performance management in the context of a "pull" economy and "internal" branding. Finally, results of recent studies on the use of promotional products by HR professionals and the value of promotional products in branding and integrated marketing efforts were released by Promotional Products Association International (PPAI). Here are some highlights:

Incentive Marketplace Is Booming

Aside from offering the latest figures on the size of the incentive marketplace – approximately $32.7 spent on brand-name incentive merchandise and $13.4 billion on incentive travel, totaling $46.1 billion for 2006 – the Incentive Federation report also looked at how brands are being used in internal and external marketing efforts.

"Incentive travel, motivational meetings and special events take on added importance given the current state of the U.S. economy," says Frank Katusak, President of the Incentive Research Foundation. "During tough economic times and in the face of corporate downsizing, these business tools become even more important to ensure that employees are working to their full potential."

According to the study, some 34% of U.S. companies used either travel or merchandise incentives last year. The average budget for travel incentives in 2006 was $164,271, with more than three-quarters of incentive travel end-users spending between $100,000 and $500,000. The typical budget for merchandise incentives was somewhat lower – $119,008 – and just under half of merchandise incentive users spent between $100,000 and $500,000.

The future also looks bright. Over half of the respondents in the Incentive Federation study predict that spending for incentive travel will go up over the next two years, while 37% feel it will stay about the same. On the merchandise side, some 34% expect budgets to stay relatively the same, while 59% expect budgets to increase.

Segmenting the Market

Looking at the incentive travel side of the incentive marketplace, the Incentive Research Foundation examined three specific segments – incentive travel, motivational meetings and special events. The total market for these three segments, according to the IRF study, totals $77.1 billion. Companies using incentive travel spent $13.4 billion, motivational meetings accounted for $25.9 billion and $37.8 billion was spent on special events. The study also found that, on average, large companies (those with $100 million or more in revenue) sponsored 3.6 incentive travel trips in 2006, held 4.7 motivational meetings and put together 91.3 special events. And the numbers for all three segments are predicted to increase.

One of the surprises coming out of the IRF study, according to Rodger Stotz of Maritz, who is also Chair of the Incentive Research Foundation's Research Committee, is that motivational meetings make up such a large percentage of the total – significantly more than what respondents labeled "incentive travel." "We use the term incentive travel rather loosely," he says, "and we need over time to become more granular in how we look at it and market to it."

Putting People First

Pulling Together: The Increased Role and Impact of People in Organizations, a new study by the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement, looks at how a number of forces – workforce demographics, technological developments and the increasing complexity of job demands – are affecting the workplace, concluding that U.S. companies will soon be facing a debilitating talent shortage unless they do something to address these critical issues.  

According to Frank Mulhern of Northwestern University, author of the study, "We're really moving into an era of greater talent shortages and greater need for employee retention, satisfaction and engagement." The report essentially looks at how the migration to a "pull" economy and other factors are contributing to a demand for greater skills, while an aging U.S. population and other trends are resulting in a shrinking pool of workers who possess those skills. The study concludes by looking at a number of practices – including incentives, rewards, recognition and internal branding – that companies can use to meet the challenge of an impending talent crunch.

Mulhern also notes that the message incentive companies deliver has to be about people – via employee satisfaction, engagement and empowerment – and not tactics. "I think there's a tendency for the industry to put its solutions first, because that's what they're selling," he says. "But vendors and suppliers have to understand that end-users have this fundamental problem involving people – cultivating a work environment that encourages and helps people to utilize their talents in a way that echoes the company's values and mission – in other words, their brand. Once that's understood, then [we can] get into what the actual solutions can do."

The Value of Promotional Products

The effectiveness of specific types of tools or rewards in achieving targeted goals is the focus of two recent studies by Promotional Products Association International (PPAI).
When PPAI surveyed attendees at the Society of Human Resource Managers (SHRM) Show in June of this year, it found that 75% of those who have rewards and recognition programs (including employee service awards, anniversary recognition programs, referral programs and others) say they use branded promotional products in those programs, with 72% agreeing that promotional products are effective in motivating, rewarding and recognizing employees.

"People will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you made them feel," says Paul Kiewiet, PPAI Chair and Vice President of Incentive Marketing, a CorpLogoWare affiliate. "Creating an efficient and collaborative work environment where employees feel involved and motivated is critical to the success of internal marketing and branding. Promotional products serve as a personal and tangible recognition of an employee's contributions and help address some of the key challenges faced by corporate America related to employee engagement, communications and interdepartmental integration."

Another study, Promotional Products Are a Key Ingredient in Integrated Marketing, looked at consumer advertising via three different advertising media – television commercials, print ads and promotional products – and found that adding an imprinted promotional product to the mix increased favorable attitudes toward the ads in all cases. In some instances, the use of a promotional product alone as the advertising medium achieved maximum impact – up to 69% in increasing brand interest and 84% in creating a favorable impression of the brand.

The study measured credibility, attitudes, product purchase intention, referral value, impressions of the advertisement and perceptions about the product. According to researchers, the results clearly indicate that promotional products:

• may be effectively used as a stand-alone advertising medium
• will effectively supplement other advertising media when added to the ad mix
• can enhance impressions of both brand and product
• can contribute to the consumer's intent to buy.

Integrated Strategies: DHL Builds a Service Culture to Support Its Brand

Recognition is key to DHL's efforts to engage employees in supporting its brand promise

DHL's goal for its shipping business is to be the "first choice" for customers in all of its shipping markets – including the U.S., where it currently lags behind a couple of other very prominent competitors. The differentiator that the company has chosen in its bid for the top spot is a familiar one: customer service. But it's more than that. A lot more. DHL is pursuing customer service in a holistic way, making service the driving force across all of its customer touchpoints, both internally and externally. In other words, service is everyone's job, their top priority, their reason for being.

But how do you build a comprehensive service culture and cultivate an attitude of accountability in employees to ensure the brand promise is fulfilled? One of the ways DHL accomplishes this is through its award-winning "I'm on it" campaign. This national integrated marketing campaign supports an external brand message promising first-choice service and accountability to customers. It also incorporates an internal employee engagement effort that makes use of rewards and recognition to create a culture where all employees understand that everything they do is centered on the customer. The recognition effort reinforces a message that says, "I'm accountable to my coworkers, to the organization and to customers" – in other words, "I'm on it."

Building the Brand Promise

Tom Snowberger, Senior Vice President of Human Resources for DHL Express, says that creating a culture to support that brand promise starts with the recruitment process, involves clear metrics built around the customer and includes a reward structure that continually reinforces that each DHL employee has a way in which he or she can impact the customer.

"It all starts with recruiting people who have that mentality of decision-making and of putting the customer first," explains Snowberger. "We look in part for people who have come from service organizations and who have demonstrated through their positions or actions where they've made a difference in a customer's life. And it's not only about serving the end customer, it's also about serving the internal customers who ultimately serve the end customer. A lot of the recruitment effort is built around looking for people who are accustomed to working in a broad-based matrixed kind of organization where the focus is on the customer experience."

Once hired, employees go through what Snowberger calls a "dynamic mapping process" where small groups of employees sit with a facilitator to discuss certain questions that impact performance "and the decisions that we all have in our everyday jobs. We use a mapping process to see the connecting points by which those decisions and actions ultimately affect the customer. It's all about getting clear line of sight back to a customer interface."

Even employees who don't deal directly with the customer learn to make these connections. For example, an accountant might be working on creating numbers that plug into sales or service performance metrics, a receptionist might be creating the first impression that a customer has of DHL. "Responsiveness, commitment to do something, and follow-up on what you said you were going to do – these are elements that we want to be sure everyone understands the importance of," Snowberger adds.

Recognition as a Differentiator

"Recognition for us is a cultural element that's not only a differentiator to our customer, it's also a differentiator for us as an employer and a differentiator of the internal behaviors that we want to recognize and reward," says Snowberger.

It all revolves around DHL's MVP site, the company's web-based recognition hub. Through the hub – developed for DHL by O.C. Tanner – managers can recognize and reward employees, peers can recognize peers and everyone can see who's being recognized and rewarded and why. From the MVP site, "Just Say Thanks" cards can be generated and sent from peer to peer or from a manager in recognition of a person's individual contribution or extra effort. Managers and supervisors can also use the site to deliver more formal gold, silver or bronze awards for performance that carry a point value based on the level of contribution or impact on the customer. Points are accumulated and can be redeemed for gifts and prizes.

The top DHL recognition award is the CEO Award, which Snowberger describes as a way for the CEO to recognize extraordinary effort of "individuals who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to put the first-choice culture and the customer relationship on the front page, and who did something extraordinary to help support a customer in a unique situation."

The MVP site also tracks awards to provide detailed reporting. "We can actually drill down by each board member to see how many people in their respective organizations received some form of recognition through this platform, as well as which managers and departments are making use of the recognition tool," Snowberger says. "It's a way to keep it visible at the board level to make sure that we all realize the value of recognition and continue to encourage an environment where recognition is a key component of our culture."

DHL also uses the MVP site, among other vehicles, to disseminate stories about employees who go out of their way to help customers. "We will videotape employees describing what they did to meet customer demands," Snowberger says, "so that's an added opportunity for those individuals to be recognized by telling their story. And those stories and those experiences are accessible to everybody through the MVP site."

Managers as Leaders

Leadership training is another key to the success of DHL's internal branding. "Part of what we're building for 2008 is a more concrete description of the leadership behavioral model," says Snowberger. "It's about what it takes – what are the behaviors of leadership that will create an environment that cultivates what people need to do every day in their jobs, in terms of their physical and emotional behavior, to meet the needs of the customer?"

These recognition tools are important, Snowberger says, because they provide a tangible way to formally recognize people. "But the ultimate success is that through leadership behavior, through leadership development of our culture, we'll evolve as an organization and build a culture that's capable of continuing to win."