Your brand must be embraced and embodied internally before it can be sold externally.

How many times have you been excited about purchasing a new service, but in doing so, find out that the experience is not at all what you expected? Because of a crafty, clever, or appealing advertising message, you expected and hoped for something outstanding but the staff just didn’t deliver. And you come away disappointed.

Marketing professionals spend so much energy and time to establish a brand by creating advertising that is emotional and beautiful and that effectively speaks to the consumer in just the right tone and style. But is the brand promise delivered when the consumer responds to our advertising messages?

It’s not enough to create great ads. To effectively build a brand, the brand promise and the brand essence must be embraced internally.

The staff, with every customer contact, must reflect and manifest the brand. There must be buy-in from everyone in the organization. And that is not easy to accomplish. The marketing goals and efforts should be effectively communicated and sold internally. There must be internal ownership of the brand personally.

It may be better to communicate a weak brand message than to communicate one that is not consistent with the consumer’s experience. It’s very difficult to retain customers if when sampling the brand their expectations are not met.

That’s why internal marketing is so important. Marketing the brand internally is essential to creating the brand externally. The entire team should understand the essence of the brand and know how important it is for them to embody that brand and to be diligent in delivering the brand promise.

Is your organization’s marketing effective? Sometimes that’s determined long before consumers ever see the first ad.