Brand From the Inside: Eight Essentials to Emotionally Connect Your Employees to Your Business [Hardcover]

Libby Sartain (Author), Mark Schumann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2006

In Brand from the Inside, Libby Sartain and Mark Schumann, branding experts who helped to build employer brands at Southwest Airlines and Yahoo!, describe this secret weapon for a business. The book gives leaders across an organization step-by-step instruction on how to motivate employees to consistently deliver the experience the customer brand promises. By building the employer brand from inside the business—ensuring consistent authenticity, substance, and voice throughout the business—any organization can unleash a powerful tool to emotionally engage employees and recruit and retain the best people.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"These days the claim that 'Our People Are Our Greatest Asset' has replaced 'The Customer Is Always Right' as the corporate slogan that is easiest to agree with yet hardest to put into practice. If you want to learn what it really means, you must read this book."
—Marcus Buckingham,independent consultant; former senior consultant, The Gallup Organization; and author

"Eight out of ten companies do not do what this book recommends. The 20 percent who do are the most admired market leaders. It is impossible to do justice to the value this book offers in a sentence or two. You must--repeat, must¾read it."
—Dr. Jac Fitz-Enz, founder and CEO, Human Capital Source; senior editor, Human Capital Magazine; author and pioneer in the field of human capital benchmarking

"At last, Mark Schumann and Libby Sartain have gotten the issue of branding right for the rest of us. No brand is any better than the willingness and inclination of employees to deliver on the brand’s promise. Delivering the brand from the inside out is the only strategy that works. Anyone interested in branding must read this important how-to book!"
—Roger D’Aprix, author, Communicating for Change: Connecting the Workplace with the Marketplace

"Employment branding is on the frontier of strategic HR thinking because no other 'people strategy' has a greater long-term impact on recruiting and retention. This book should just be called 'the answer,' because it provides a compelling case as well as the required steps for utilizing internal employment branding to emotionally tie workers to their employer. It is simply the best book on internal employee branding, period!"
—Dr. John Sullivan, professor of management, San Francisco State University; and author

"This is an important book about how branding is changing throughout our new wired world. It gives you a sneak peek at how to engineer strong inside brands. From marketing to all-points-leadership, this book is a map to future corporate value."
—Tim Sanders, author, The Likeability Factor

From the Inside Flap

Can a business build an effective brand identity if its employees don't buy into it? The key role of employees in brand delivery makes building and nurturing the employer brand as critical to an organization's success as promoting the customer brand.

In Brand from the Inside, Libby Sartain and Mark Schumann, branding experts who helped to build employer brands at Southwest Airlines and Yahoo!, describe this secret weapon for a business. The book gives leaders across an organization step-by-step instruction on how to motivate employees to consistently deliver the experience the customer brand promises. By building the employer brand from inside the business—ensuring consistent authenticity, substance, and voice throughout the business—any organization can unleash a powerful tool to emotionally engage employees and recruit and retain the best people.

Brand from the Inside offers a framework for developing an environment where people from all levels of the business work together to create the employer brand. The book is filled with illustrative examples and down-to-earth case histories from companies that demonstrate what the employer brand can contribute to business results. In addition, the authors include a wealth of tools and worksheets for breaking through silos to brand from the inside. Use the book's sample meeting agendas and presentation ideas to build a new employer brand, improve a current one, or "rehab" one that needs some attention.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (April 14, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787981893
• ISBN-13: 978-0787981891
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #253,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Libby Sartain SPHR, CCP
HR Advisor

After 30 years in corporate HR/Talent Management, Sartain is now an active business advisor, Board Member, and HR thought leader. She is the former CHRO of both Yahoo! Inc. and Southwest Airlines and serves on the Board of Directors of Peet's Coffee & Tea, Inc., (Nasdaq: PEET). Yahoo and Southwest were both recognized as one of the 100 Best Companies To Work For in America during her tenure.

Sartain is an active advisor to several start ups including Alumrise, Jobvite, Reputationdefender.com and consultant on HR, Employer Branding and Talent Management. A frequent speaker and is often quoted as a thought leader in human resources.

Sartain served as chairman of the board of the Society for Human Resource Management in 2001 and was named fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources in 1998. Human Resources Executive named her as one of the 25 most powerful women in HR in 2005. She holds an MBA from the University of North Texas and a BBA from Southern Methodist University.

Sartain is the co-author of HR from the Heart: Inspiring Stories and Strategies for Building the People Side of Great Business, AMACOM and Brand from the Inside: Eight Essentials to Connect Your Employees to Your Business, Jossey-Bass. And her newest book, Brand for Talent: Eight Essentials to Make Your Talent As Famous As Your Brand was published in early April 2009 by Jossey-Bass.

She posts regularly to her blog at www.brandfortalent.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Perfect Title for the Right Brand Strategy, January 21, 2008

By 

Rex Whisman "brandchampionsblog.com" (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brand From the Inside: Eight Essentials to Emotionally Connect Your Employees to Your Business (Hardcover)

This is one of the premier books on brand development. The authors are spot on in advocating that brands are most effective when built from the inside out. If we do not engage our employees in the procees and get their buy-in we do not have a brand. Too often brand development is a communications and marketing effort. We need to make sure that we include HR as our brand partners, or brand leaders. There is a reason why Southwest Airlines is traditionally one of the first companies that comes to mind when we think of a case study in branding, and why it is consistently profitable. If I am not mistaken, it is the only US airline to be profitable each year since 9/11. I have seen Libby present before and she is one of the real pros in branding.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Internal marketing with an HR twist, August 7, 2006

By 

Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brand From the Inside: Eight Essentials to Emotionally Connect Your Employees to Your Business (Hardcover)

This predictable book on branding has a slight twist: aim your branding efforts at your employees as well as at your customers. Simple enough. Authors Libby Sartain and Mark Schumann have boiled employer branding down to eight essentials. Generally, they focus on their core concept with a positive orientation toward employees, although their lists, checklists and lists within lists do get repetitive. Maybe all those lists are intended to help the staff in human resources, where they place much of the responsibility for internal branding. We recommend this book to branding and internal marketing newcomers who want a rundown of the basics, and to human resource professionals who may need to learn about marketing to harness the impact of internal branding.

2.0 out of 5 stars Written by and for HR staff of large corporations., October 12, 2010

By 

Daniel Ginensky (Bet Shemesh Israel) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Brand From the Inside: Eight Essentials to Emotionally Connect Your Employees to Your Business (Hardcover)

DISCLOSURE:
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I am a small business owner, and bought this book for ideas on how to increase loyalty among my employees.

SUMMARY:
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"Branding from the Inside" provides a conceptual framework for HR to increase employee loyalty. The writing is not great, as the authors have a tendency to ramble. On the plus side, the book is structured logically, and includes some illustrative stories from iconic USA corporations.

SHORTCOMINGS:
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While I did get some benefit from this book, it falls far short of its promise. The authors are HR professionals who don't own or run their own business (except perhaps consulting), and therein lies the problem. Here is my list of shortcomings for this book:

1. The subtitle is highly misleading: "...Connect Your Employees To Your Business". I understood this to mean the book was written for business owners. It isn't.

2.The advice given all relates to large corporate settings with huge budgets. You need a good imagination to apply this book to a small business.

3. It is the job of the leader of any business to promote employee loyalty. HR has almost no ability to change a culture without full partnership with the leadership. This point is mentioned, but it was not dealt with as a deal-breaking issue.

4. I found most of the case histories to be clichéd and not useful.

CONCLUSIONS:
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I give the authors credit for creating a fairly robust conceptual framework to accomplish a complex goal. I just did not find it useful.

After reading quite a few business books, this book has helped me realize a golden rule: only buy books written by entrepreneurs, business owners, marketing directors, or high level executives. Business books written by HR professionals, business professors, and consultants are theoretical and focused on large corporations. This book certainly was.