Internal brand research is key to the success of any branding or rebranding project.
It’s the only way to truly understand how internal stakeholders—including your team, your leadership, and your investors—experience and understand your brand.
Almost invariably, we find that our clients are surprised—often shocked—by the insights that internal brand research returns.
Unfortunately, few people understand what internal brand research is, let alone know why it’s so important.
So, in this post, we’ll look at what we mean by internal brand research, we’ll show you why it’s so critical to building a better brand, and we’ll show you two ways to conduct internal research that are guaranteed to give you some of the most profound—and actionable—insights of your branding journey.
CONTENTS
- What is Internal Brand Research?
- Why Internal Brand Research Matters
- How to Conduct Internal Brand Research
- The Takeaway
What is Internal Brand Research?
Internal brand research is the process of better understanding how internal stakeholders experience a brand. Internal stakeholders can include everyone from frontline employees to C-suite executives to board members to investors.
Internal brand research is the other side of the coin from customer research. Each of these two research initiatives should compliment one another. Only by understanding how a brand is perceived by both internal and external stakeholders can you hope optimally position the brand in the marketplace.
As we’ll see, brands whose positioning is informed by internal brand research are more likely to build strong company culture and attract the industry’s top talent.
Why Internal Brand Research Matters
When most business leaders think about their brand, they think about the external dimensions—all the outward-facing touchpoints with which their customers interact every day. But your inward-facing brand is equally as important.
Why? Because your internal brand determines how your team interacts with customers—as well as how they interact with one another.
Your employees are literally the face of your brand. Every single one of them is a brand ambassador, even the ones who don’t deal directly with clients.
For both customer experience and company culture, it’s critical that your employees understand your brand at the deepest level. The problem is most employees don’t.
Gallup found that only 41% of employees understood what their brand stood for and what made it different from its competitors.
The same poll found that only 37% of non-executives and non-managers understood their brand’s promise and competitive differentiation.
These are the staff who are interacting with customers every day.
Our own experience as a branding agency has revealed similar results. While rebranding a national healthcare brand, our internal brand research found that portions of the company’s frontline staff weren’t just confused about what the brand stood for, they were downright antithetical to it.
What’s more, these pockets of misaligned staff were concentrated at two particular facilities. Survey results at these facilities were some of the lowest we’d ever seen. For the company’s leadership, the data was a wakeup call.
The reason our findings were so surprising is that the company thought it had a good understanding of how its employees experienced its brand. They had data from periodic employee engagement surveys, supervisor performance evaluations, and the like.
But surveys like these are not the same as internal brand research.
Employee satisfaction surveys might be useful for human resources and organizational development, but the data they reveal is not what’s needed to understand how your employees experience your brand.
For starters, how an employee feels about his or her supervisor is not the same as how they feel about the brand as a whole. Internal brand research reveals perceptions that are quite separate from the interpersonal dynamics of the workplace.
This isn’t to suggest that internal brand research will always reveal shockingly negative perceptions. But it’s always better to be aware of such issues if they exist, rather than leaving them to fester and cause further problems down the road.
Make no mistake: if your employees have a negative perception of your brand, it will directly affect your bottom line. It sours customer relations, undercuts potential deals, and turns company culture into a toxic environment.
Not even the strongest brand can withstand such dynamics.
Good or bad, an honest portrait of your brand is essential if you want to understand its current state, correct what’s holding you back, and move confidently toward the future.
How to Conduct Internal Brand Research
From focus groups to language audits to company-wide surveys, there are a number of tactics that can used to understand how your brand is perceived by your internal stakeholders.
Most of these methods can be categorized in terms of qualitative and quantitative research.
Qualitative Research
Qualitative brand research consists of interviewing internal stakeholders to better understand how they think about your brand. Interviewees usually include targeted segments of the workforce such as sales, marketing, customer support, executives, etc.
Qualitative interviews return some of the deepest and richest insights possible. Interview notes should be analyzed though qualitative coding and theme-building to identify key challenges and strengths of the brand.
Regardless of whether they’re done one-on-one or in focus groups, it takes time to do these interviews right. Another limitation of qualitative research is that it usually isn’t possible to interview every employee within an organization.
That’s where quantitative research comes in.
Quantitative Research
Quantitative brand research consists of online surveys designed to collect data from a wide range of participants that will either confirm or deny certain hypotheses developed in the qualitative research phase.
For example, if qualitative research reveals that a sample of your employees think your brand is lousy at communicating with its customers, quantitative research will either confirm or deny whether the majority of your employees think the same way.
If they do, you’ve probably got a problem.
By confirming or denying the hypotheses developed in the qualitative phase, internal quantitative brand research helps you make confident decisions about the future of your brand—and your business.
The Takeaway
If you’re going to invest in a rebrand, the best advice is to do it right. This means allocating enough time and budget to truly understand your brand from the inside out.
Internal brand research is the only way to get a comprehensive understanding of how your employees perceive your brand. Considering that your employees are your most important brand ambassadors, you can’t afford not to know what they think.
Brian Lischer
A prolific blogger, speaker, and columnist, Brian has two decades of experience in design and branding. He’s written for publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, HuffPost, and Brand Quarterly.
