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Building the Brand of Your Innovation Team: Advice & Tactics

By Scott Kirsner |  May 21, 2021
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It’s good to have goals. 

In a recent conversation held on Clubhouse, we brought together a group of four innovators with experience working in pharmaceuticals, financial services, transportation, and luxury goods to talk about the challenges of internal and external communication. How do you make sure your colleagues, and people outside the organization, are aware of your initiative and what you’re trying to achieve?

Our goal for the hour-long conversation was to collect a set of seven tips related to internal brand-building, and seven related to external brand-building. We surpassed that. The tips appear below; to create a safe conversational environment, we promised our speakers that we wouldn’t attach their names or companies to this lightly-edited notes document. We have, however, included several concrete examples that were mentioned during the conversation and have been publicly-promoted.

Internal Branding Advice

  • Be consistent. Branding and communication shouldn’t happen in waves. Get a consistent message out over time, instead of sporadically.
  • We run short webinars, things that don’t feel routine, for our employees. We focus on topics that feel timely and relevant, and they don’t happen every month. You have to be there live to participate.

  • Some companies publish their scenario planning. DHL has done this. By sharing content and output, they’re inviting a conversation that might not otherwise happen. Decathlon in France has just published the entire work of their innovation and foresight team. It’s all about attracting “third circle” relationships — friends of friends. You don’t want to just be interacting with partners and ideas that come from inside your industry. 

(Featured photo by Photo by Yu Kato on Unsplash.)

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