Wall Street’s behavior in recent times has undoubtedly given banking and financial companies headaches when it comes to building loyalty. To reestablish trust with consumers, smart brand managers know that any marketing campaign begins from the inside out, with the company employees who are essential in bringing the brand and its message to life. “The financial services industry has been in a difficult period and challenging economy, and that’s changed people’s perspectives,” says Charles Armstrong, vice president of brand management for industry giant Lincoln Financial Group (pictured above).
That was why before Lincoln Financial debuted its new You’re In Charge marketing platform on national TV on Thanksgiving Day, the Fortune 250 firm orchestrated a major internal launch campaign targeting its 8,000 employees. While this occurred well over a week before the public rollout, the company began seeding its campaign even earlier, using teasers in annual benefits enrollment materials and in internal company communications up to a month beforehand.
Lincoln Financial, the nation’s number-three seller of insurance products and number five in annuity products, with $153 billion in assets under management, used launch events, promotional products, and even the help of non-managerial but nonetheless influential employees in the company to spread the campaign at its various operations across the country.
Those were textbook campaign strategies to corporate management expert David Maxfield, a co-founder and research vice president of Provo, UT-based consultancy VitalSmarts, as well as motivation and engagement market veteran Gayle Duncan, vice president of engagement marketing for Maritz Canada and the newly created Maritz Loyalty Marketing, in Toronto.
“Seeking out opinion leaders is important to influencing organizational change,” says Maxfield, who adds that this is especially true for an initiative that changes the way a company presents itself to the public. “Find respected employees and give them a chance to evaluate, kick the tires, and adjust the initiative.”
Every new marketing campaign should not only fulfill the external brand promise but also mobilize the organization internally, says Duncan. It’s also essential for the person in charge of the brand campaign to account for the quality of the brand experience at all consumer-interfacing points, she adds.
Duncan says companies now understand that engaged employees, who are attuned to a brand’s promise, are keys to delivering influential experiences. “There needs to be an internal and external alignment of the brand,” she notes. “The campaign needs to take the same approach of engaging employees. A happily engaged employee is the best brand ambassador.”
Getting Employees Vested
Lincoln Financial, headquartered in Radnor, PA, outside Philadelphia, began designing the You’re In Charge campaign in winter 2010 with gyro New York, a unit of global marketing and advertising agency gyro. The two nailed down a positive-reinforcement approach that urged consumers to take charge of their financial futures and reminded them that they are in control.
Both Armstrong and Keith Turco, president of gyro New York, agreed that a hopeful message could counter the Wall Street negativity. “There’s been a big drain in confidence in the financial industry,” Turco says, to which Armstrong notes, “Our platform confronts that head-on.”
The ads—Lincoln Financial’s first since 2007—debuted on Nov. 24, during the nationally televised Today Show, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Green Bay Packers–Detroit Lions NFL game, and prime-time movie It’s a Wonderful Life. They carried the You’re In Charge slogan and the Chief Life Officer catchphrase. “Our customers are CEOs of their lives—they are Chief Life Officers,” Armstrong explains.
The catchphrase and slogan were intended to strike a chord with employees, too. “As a Fortune 250 company, frankly, we didn’t believe our brand had caught up,” Armstrong admits. “Our employees deserve a brand that’s powerful. We’re responsible for the internal brand as much as the external brand.”
For Lincoln Financial’s employees, You’re In Charge is about empowerment and taking the lead at work—in how they conduct themselves and serve customers. “The message is, ‘How did I help customers take charge of their lives today?’ We need to promote the same message inside and outside,” says Armstrong, who adds, “It’s important that the employees are part of this process because they’re at the vanguard of delivering the brand to our customers and sales channel partners every day.”
Turco notes: “Charlie was extremely focused on validating the campaign for both internal and external communications, in getting the same brand messaging points across. We talked about the importance of having 8,000 brand advocates.”
Armstrong and his team used that positive view implicitly by enlisting some 50 employees from across the organization to become what he calls brand influencers. All of them had enthusiastic personalities and positive outlooks, he explains, adding, “We frankly steered away from marketing people and toward more rank-and-file employees who had real credibility among fellow workers.”
These brand influencers, after a bit of training, served as local ambassadors of You’re In Charge, from Hartford, CT, to Fort Wayne, IN, to Omaha, NE. Helping manage the launch centers, which were strategically located at each Lincoln Financial operation on Nov. 17, they presented the talking points of the marketing campaign and answered questions from peers. To Armstrong, the fact that each launch center was differently located—some were in building lobbies, the Radnor office’s launch site was in the staff cafeteria, and others took place in conference rooms—mattered less than the brand influencers’ uniform presentations.
Each resource center unwrapped “launch boxes” consisting of posters, brochures, videos of the TV ads, and other promotional products. The most intriguing item was a coffee mug that played on the Chief Life Officer hook. It was made of a rewritable surface, and printed on it was a fill-in-the-blank line, allowing users to create personal catchphrases (photo at top). Providing additional reinforcement, computer screensavers with whimsical examples such as Chief Big Idea Officer got workers’ creative juices going.
“We want employees to play with the brand,” Armstrong says. “Usually, a company doesn’t want anyone to touch the brand idea, calling it sacrosanct. But we believe it should be approachable and fun. It’s how you engage employees and not force the idea down their throats.”
Engaging Futures
A new marketing and brand campaign can serve as the springboard for a long-term employee engagement strategy; it is just one step toward building or enriching the company culture, says Maritz’s Duncan. It gives a company the opportunity to explore its core values, but it “has to be true to the company’s values from the beginning,” she says. “You have one shot. If you don’t believe in what you’re promoting, people sense it.”
Duncan also notes that any brand campaign needs to be supplemented by other motivational strategies like employee incentives and job stimulation. “The employees are going to be engaged in the program, but are they going to be more loyal to the company?” she notes. “It has to expand beyond the marketing campaign.”
Armstrong agrees. “The hard work, frankly, still lies ahead, in ‘operationalizing’ the platform to make it the heart of everything we do—from how we sell our products to customers, to the role that empowerment can play in our customer interactions, to even the way we answer our phones,” he notes. “The more we use this brand in different ways big and small, the more it will become our essence.”
Armstrong says Lincoln Financial is expanding the You’re In Charge campaign into print media, such as magazines and newspapers, as well as radio, in 2012. Internally, the company is developing brand collateral such as email signature templates for employees to use in their correspondence, scripts for its customer service agents, and audio clips for the customer service phone lines. “Under this platform, we can create a common set of language,” says Armstrong, adding, “It’s more about crystallizing our culture than changing it. It gives greater definition.”
Signs of You’re In Charge’s cultural penetration are starting to appear. “You’ll hear people make a point by using Chief Life Officer and make jokes about it in our meetings, and some employees are writing in about the campaign. Our sales meetings are adopting the theme of taking charge to help customers take charge,” says Armstrong. “People are willingly using the email signature. We’re starting to engage them.”
Employee recognition will be a large part of the You’re In Charge plan. “Last week, our Fort Wayne operation’s human resources team received a certificate of achievement for doing something unrelated, but it was given the Chief Do-It-All Officers title on the certificate,” notes Armstrong. “The campaign is starting to be applied toward recognizing our employees. We’re going to be expanding promotional products and items that can be used in employee recognition, and we want to explore employee incentives significantly down the road.”