Delivering brand promise to employees: Internal branding

The contemporary marketing environment which is highly competitive and uncertain forces the companies to be different from their competitors. For making difference and gaining competitive advantage, branding has come into prominence. By providing unique values to satisfy customers constitutes the basis of branding. The brand values are delivered by using some marketing tools. As delivering brand values, the promise must be realized. Herein, employees who described as the brand ambassadors come to fore. Hence, employees must understand and embrace the brand values to deliver them in desired manner. In order to achieve these goals, companies adopt and implement internal branding approach.In this study, the concept of internal branding, the importance and implementation of internal branding investigated. This thesis basically consists of two structures. With the aim of establish a theoretical background, the concepts relating to external branding and internal branding are examined. In the application section, it is aimed to find out the importance of internal branding for companies, how internal branding implements, success factors and difficulties encountered in the process. To obtain information on these topics, in-depth interviews were carried out with two companies. As a result of the interviews, it is observed that both of the companies comprehend the importance of their employees? role in the branding process. Companies are aware of the internal branding approach and apply it. On the other hand, during the process of transferring company related information, companies focus on corporate culture more than brand. So, brand related information plays second fiddle. In addition, it is determined that the internal branding activities generally intensify at the beginning of the branding and institutionalization activities, recruitment and orientation training periods.