Which employee insights should shape our brand positioning?

Use employees' accounts of the business and its customers to shape brand positioning, but investigate where those accounts come from before treating them as a reliable basis for decisions. Follow up on conflicting views to distinguish customer experience from inherited competitor narratives and identify employee engagement needs.

Understand the source of each perception

Ask employees how they formed their views of the business, particularly when accounts conflict. In interviews for a client's brand strategy, many employees described the company as trusted and dependable. Others, almost a third of those interviewed, described it as arrogant, expensive, lacking in innovation and slow to deliver. They also said customers were looking elsewhere.

Nearly all the employees giving the negative account had previously worked for the company's nearest competitor. Follow-up interviews traced that perception to a narrative cultivated as competitive propaganda. Identifying the perception issue helped guide the strategy towards employee engagement.

Use conflicting accounts to guide further questions rather than accepting either account at face value. Leave space in interviews for employees to explain their experience in their own terms. Silence, attentive listening and questions guided by the interviewee's situation can reveal a different story from the one an initial interview plan anticipated.

Sources: Research is how we ask questions, listen and learn

How The Frameworks helps

Turning employee insight into positioning

You need a clear basis for deciding how employees' perspectives should shape your brand positioning. The Frameworks connects employee and stakeholder research with audience insight, keeping the relationship between internal understanding and external expectations central to the strategy. It works with your brand team and business leaders to clarify the positioning problem before developing creative responses, so employee contributions inform a shared strategic direction rather than remain a collection of opinions.

The Frameworks develops a brand platform that defines your positioning, messaging that expresses it and a verbal and visual identity that puts it into practice. These give you a way to turn what you have learned from employees into decisions about what the brand says and how it presents itself. Your teams gain a common reference for explaining the business, assessing proposed communications and keeping brand expression consistent across different uses.

Let’s talk about employee insight and brand positioning 

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