Where's the incentives? Branding from the inside out: how to motivate your employees so that they participate enthusiastically in your next promotion or marketing campaign.

• Author: Bernstal, Janet Bigham
• Position: Campaigns - Cover Story

When it comes to engaging employees in your next bank promotion or campaign, experts sum up the best approach in a word: communicate, You have to communicate vision, enthusiasm and the caring nature of your corporate culture.

"Most often, an enormous amount of time is spent on what to promote, how to price, and how to entice the customer," claims Charlene Stern, chief experience officer at NewGround, a design/build and branding firm for financial institutions: The firm is headquartered in St. Louis. "The critical success factor overlooked is the employees, who man be your evangelists or they can let it drop with a thud."

Before you expect them to jump up and cheer your next home loan special offering, ask yourself, "Will they feel cared about or imposed upon with the newest list of instructions?"

"You've got to give them a reason to be excited and engaged," urges Stem. "Engage them in the vision and mission, and they care. You can't fake it."

Incentives work free, but rather than trying to get employees in line, or having them follow, Stem suggests the most successful tactic is to get them "unleashed" and that involves the internal campaign before you ever go public.

This "unleashing" can be compared to a process Linda Bishop calls "branding from the inside out."

"The concept is to brand yourself internally before you take your message out to the public," states Bishop, the president of HavrillaBishop Marketing in Lancaster, Pa., who spent last fall taking her message about "Branding From the Inside Out" to bankers throughout the Northeast. (See sidebar entitled, "Inside-Out Branding.")

A crucial step in branding from the inside out in terms of a campaign or promotion is to determine the broad objectives and communicate them to the people who have to execute it.

"In the planning process, before you roll out the campaign, get input from the people so it's a much more collaborative planning process," suggests Bishop.

Following are some examples of what banks around the country are doing to garner employee enthusiasm for their promotional campaigns:

NORTH MIDDLESEX SAVINGS BANK

Ayer, Mass.

Assets: $295 million

Before managers at Middlesex Savings Bank decided to roll out their new Internet banking product two years ago, they surveyed the employees to find out how many actually used the Internet.

"We were stunned at the results," announced Patty Thorpe, vice president of marketing. "Many of our employees did not use the Internet at all and had no interest in Internet banking. How, we wondered, would they sell the product if they themselves had no interest in it?"

The first challenge was to get those employees wired at home. The bank offered all employees an interest-free loan to purchase a new computer, paid back via payroll deductions. The computers were purchased in bulk, and the savings passed on to the participants. The only "catch" was that employees had to agree to participate in the Internet banking pilot program. The response was huge, and a pilot test of the Easy Link Internet bank product was launched.

"Up until this point, we did not have e-mail at our bank, so the next step was to link all employees via an intranet and encourage e-mail usage," explains Thorpe. "This is where we got creative, I think."

The program kicked off with a bankwide employee meeting, where presenters used a Power...