Strategic Internal Branding

Attend this hands-on workshop to learn how your organization can create internal brand strategies and tactics that will drive stronger employee engagement, and commitment to creating exceptional customer experiences and delivering on your brand promises.

The approaches discussed in this session will help you create a culture in which employees are engaged and inspired around a common vision, strategy, and brand promise and will help you align the attitudes and behaviors of employees to drive growth and activate your strategy and brand promise, in addition to:

• Learning a step-by-step framework for effective internal branding (theory, messaging, tactical planning, program management & measurement processes to track results and impact)
• Developing a message architecture–process of building a comprehensive internal message that is clear and understood, relevant, personal – and drives the right behavior required to deliver on your brand promise and business strategy
• Creating a message matrix – understanding the value of communicating the right message, to the right audience, at the right time
• Communicating internal branding projects to your audience in a meaningful way by understanding the importance of tactical resonance and message relevance
• Using a codified, proven process for creating sustainable employee engagement and brand alignment
• Implementing a process for creating tactical plans that drive greater employee participation and buy-in
• Engaging employees via social media and gamification to create engagement with fun and excitement
• Aligning your internal messaging and branding with your external brand position and promise

Rick DeMarco, Managing Director
Inward Strategic Consulting

Your goal: To use more videos for internal branding and internal communications!

Your problem: Videos cost too much money, take too much time to produce, are complicated and production is intimidating, and you don’t have a video crew.

The solution: Attend this workshop and be trained on how to create captivating videos using your own smart phone!

Learn video hacks to help your organization accomplish more with video in less time, for less money. Most importantly, learn how to create inspiring video that employees will actually want to watch and share, strengthening your brand from within!

In the most hands-on video training you will ever receive – you will have the opportunity to shoot video and recieve feedback on the spot. You’ll learn the tools and industry tricks to create, produce, and share video that will inspire and inform your employees!

Rocky Walls, CEO
12 Stars Media

Engaging brand stories—whether being told to internal or external stakeholders—should be developed with a well-honed framework that identifies the key elements, or tenets, of the brand. Each of these core tenets will be explained in detail and demonstrated as to how they each relate to both internal and external brand storytelling.

Learn a unique roadmap and approach to strategic branding – used by globally known brands such as Coca-Cola, Heineken, and Disney; and learn how to:

• Uncover and articulate the core tenets of your brand story
• Identify and leverage synergies between your internal and external brand
• Differentiate your brand through compelling propositions and promises
• Design communications and experiences that reveal and grow core brand equities

Kevin Finke, Owner & Chief Storyteller

Experience Willow

 Today, an employer brand must do more than simply attract people to work. In order to authentically deliver the brand promise and employer must inspire the right people, to deliver the right work, in the right way.

Through hands-on exercises this workshop will provide you with best practices to re-define your employer brand, respond to changes in the employment marketplace, refresh what your employer brand must achieve, and refocus how leadership inspires employees to deliver what your organization (and your brand) promise to customers, including how to:

• Strengthen the connection between the employer brand and an organization’s customers, specifically to define how employees must deliver what the brand promises to the company’s consumers  
• Secure real-time qualitative insight into how the employer brand can symbolize what it takes for an employee to “own” this connection with customers
• Engage and influence how the organization’s senior leadership live the employer brand and what that means to employees, customers, and other stakeholders

D. Mark Schumann, Principal

re-communicate

• Explore the roles of responsibility and influence across brand “circles,” and the array of feedback sources and mechanisms we have to nail down each
• Discuss the common trip-ups of cadence and questions for employee feedback - what’s “right” for your organization?
• Learn how to avoid the most common pitfalls when setting up an employee feedback system

Julia Markish, Director, Professional Services, Employee Practice

Medallia

Learn how Aon assisted Nasdaq in developing a compelling, distinctive, and authentic Employee Value Proposition, EVP, to attract high performers and resonate with their employee population. Dig deep with Aon and learn the in’s and out’s of their internal communications strategy towards management and colleague engagement in order to bring the Nasdaq employer brand to life.

Discover best practices and practical tips to aid you in effectively communicating your EVP internally, and learn how to:

• Implement new brand guidelines
• Apply your EVP to existing communications
• Develop a strategic communication strategy

The ability to influence what and how customers purchase and retention decisions are often thought of as “abstract” and “what marketing does.” Yet, deploying brand strategies across an organization is something that every employee can – and should – own.  As communicators, it is our job to make the “abstract” more tangible and to clearly explain brand strategy so employees understand how their actions support the brand and directly impact an organization’s success.

Discover best practices and practical tips to communicate your brand in a way that engages employees and encourages them to use brand strategies when making business decisions that impact customers, and learn how to:

• Engage in “Discovery Sessions” that help to move the conversation from “educating and informing” to “action and ownership”
• Make abstract concepts come to life through gamification
• Repackage employee feedback into an inspiring tool for managers and other employees
• Create a themed forum for employees to review progress and celebrate success

Beth Daniels, Brand Strategy Manager

The Standard 

Paul Barton, ABC, Principal Consultant

Paul Barton Communications LLC

To attract and engage employees voluntarily, without having to use significant bandwidth, a nonexistent budget, or enforcement power, SAP created weekly 60 second videos called “Brand Tips in a Minute.” 

These minute videos (not a second longer!) are designed to help employees understand and apply the brand while showing them how to save time and reduce headaches – all while helping to build a stronger, consistent brand.

Implement this award-winning format and other innovative practices like “Training Tuesdays”, “Brand Flashes”, and a “Brand Master” into your internal brand strategy to exceed employee brand engagement goals, including how to:

• Attract and inspire employees to create consistent, customer-centric, branded experiences
• Measure engagement data to continually improve
• Increase your brand champions across the enterprise
• Remain consistent

Joe Pantigoso, Senior Director, Global Brand

SAP 

Find out how your internal brand can benefit from the intersection of philanthropy and communications, including how to: 

• Build an innovative and multi-layer communications campaign that incorporates culture-building language and can enable employees to embody your corporate brand values
• Create your internal team with untraditional partners
• Extend your brand to employees through classic PR principles
• Measure your internal brand campaign for qualitative & quantitative results

Alison Arella, Manager of Corporate Social Responsibility

Cambia Health Solutions

At Autodesk, leaders recognize the importance of employee engagement and strategic alignment, but it can be challenging to connect with the global workforce on a regular basis. Real-time, “live” video communication enables leaders to connect with employees around the world in a powerful, effective, and highly interactive way – that engages employees better than written, verbal, or video-only communications. 

Hear the specific details about how Autodesk built “Autodesk On Air” using a webcasting platform that works equally well on traditional and mobile platforms, giving leaders and teams a live “Town Hall” experience no matter where they are based, and 24/7 access to on-demand replays.

This session will provide you with the necessary information to effectively introduce a webcasting platform of your own to engage employees, increase innovation, drive change and business results, including how to:

• Utilize video communications as an integral part of your organization’s internal brand communication strategy
• Implement a powerful workforce communication program using a step-by-step plan
• Track and understand measurable results that will prove the ROI to leadership

Michele Wolpe, Director Employee Communications

Autodesk

Malcolm Lotzof, CEO

INXPO

• Conference Chairperson: Chuck Gose, Founder & Host, ICology

Featured Panelists:

• Dr. Josh Burdett, Executive & Business Coach, Josh Burdett Group
• Dr. Sheetal Agarwal, Principal, Kwilt Strategy
• Dr. Melissa Hughes, President & Founder, The Andrick Group
  

New technology can be a driving force for creating and improving the all important employee experience, but internal communicators tend to be more on the bleeding edge (than cutting edge) of technology, providing a safer and more risk-free approach.  The speed at which technology changes and improves increases exponentially.

While every piece of new technology may not be relevant to every organization or every campaign, it’s important for you to have a basic understanding of new technology and its capabilities to further branding and culture initiatives.

This session will provide you with an overview of a number of new technologies giving you the insight you need to choose which tools are right for your organization and your existing communication campaigns, including how to:

• Use the employee experience as a driving force for the customer experience
• Secure organizational buy-in into technology investments
• Introduce new technologies into the workplace to improve communications and enhance the employee experience

Chuck Gose, Corporate Communication Practice Leader, Sales Director

BroadSign

 Employees across any organization need (and deserve!) to receive clear and cohesive messages anchored to core business goals. Communicators must lead the organization through a process to develop a corporate messaging platform that ties company vision, brand, and strategy together in a way that effectively aligns communications across the organization, and aligns employees with the brand and mission.

Learn how the USAA created and managed their corporate messaging platform to ensure brand alignment, including how to:

• Identify essential elements to build enduring corporate narrative
• Bring alignment between mission, brand, and business goals – for employees and leadership alike
• Use the right channels in order to achieve maximum impact

Jim Thomas, Executive Director, Strategic and Board Communications

USAA

With a workforce of over 28,000, spanning across 80 communities around the country – helping everyone feel included, connected, and engaged is not easy. By creating mobile communities for employee groups across Express Scripts, employees are helping to shape and champion a changing and robust culture.

Learn how social and mobile internal communications can be catalysts for culture change and community building, and learn how to:

• Implement social-based communication tools as they are becoming necessary in the modern workplace
• Pull data from social communications to provide key HR insights and intelligence
• Engage employees where they are, on their time, and based on their interests – to transform and build culture

Jennifer Pruett, Director, HR Communications

Express Scripts

Chris Dornfeld, President and Co-Founder

Bonfyre

In this interactive session you will:

• Learn why story-based content can be a successful development strategy
• Understand the makeup of engaging, compelling, and authentic stories
• Know the questions you should be asking before you start and when you are finished
• Develop cost-effective video content for multiple distribution channels: both internal and external
• Apply these approaches to your specific content needs

Denise Roberts McKee, COO
AboutFace Media

Scripps Networks Interactive is dedicated to developing creative, trendsetting, original television programming and digital content that celebrates the lifestyle categories of home, food, and travel. Their goal — to build brands for life as they’ve done with flagship networks, HGTV and Food Network. Their determination to stay on brand is what sets them apart from the competition and is a core concept that has made Scripps Networks today’s leader in lifestyle media.

But there is often a price to pay when corporations experience rapid growth and a stronger identity within their core brands. That price is a siloed and disconnected workforce that inhibits the free flow of shared communication, ideas and innovation across company lines.

To address the issue, the Internal Communications and Employee Engagement team devised an actionable strategic plan to close the gap between the Scripps Networks Interactive (mothership/umbrella) brand and its iconic network brands, as well as bolster company culture.

Through corporate social responsibly, diversity and inclusion programs and opportunities for employees to “live the brands,” the company’s culture and identity is re-emerging as the company’s focal point and is being reflected more and more in their audiences, workforce, and business.

In this session, you will learn how Scripps Networks Interactive did it all, and how you too can create a strategic brand plan across your enterprise, and learn how to:

• Create alignment – even during rapid growth
• Break down silos using the right communication channels
• Strengthen company culture and show employees they are valued
• Improve new hire experiences, engage employees, and increase retention rates

Janet Testerman, Manager, Corporate Communications

Scripps Networks Interactive

For the first time in over a decade, Intel slipped from being one of the top 10 most valuable brands in the world. Their brand value had eroded due to both a decline in the PC and the fact that Millennials grew up in an age without Intel. The vast majority of people only knew Intel as a PC processor company. But in reality, their business extends across other key technology sectors from the data center to wearables, Internet of Things, software, security, and more.

To return their brand to a position of strength, Intel knew exactly where to start – with their employees. They set out to rebuild the brand from the inside-out. Hear practical tips and see real examples of how Intel strengthened awareness of the extraordinary range of places and spaces where their technology lives and the impact it has on literally billions of people.

Gain a fresh perspective on how you can rebrand your company using your most important asset – your employees, including how to:

• Create an “Inside Out” experience
• Develop a storytelling hub and social media platform for employees to easily share stories through their social networks about themselves and their organization
• Launch an internal communications campaign featuring employees

Shannon Smith, Director, Employer Branding

Intel  

• Share your "golden nuggets" with the group


• Start an action plan to implement as soon as you get back to the office


• Leave this conference filled with knowledge and motivation with your new action plan!