Shape of Things

I was talking with a friend this morning who is selling his company on the idea of internal branding. It seems everybody in this fast-growing company has a different story on who the company is and what it does.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a bad thing. After all, if it’s internal, who cares? Let everyone make up their own stories about their employer.

Only problem is that there’s no such thing as internal when it comes to communications, especially now when everyone has personal broadcasting channels and the enterprise might be spread throughout the world. So, as controlling as it might sound, spreading the brand identity internally is just as important — perhaps even more so — than what a company says externally.

Given this environment, companies have to ask themselves: Do our major shareholders, our employees, really know our story, and are they invested enough in it to spread the word?