Brand from the Inside: Eight Essentials to Emotionally Connect Your Employees to Your Business

by Libby Sartain, Mark Schumann

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.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Historical Romance

262 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Exina · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars

This book was needed for my studies. It is one of the best textbooks I’ve read about employer branding.

[Rick Aster · Rating 1 out of 5]

Branding at its worst is not an integral way of being for a company, but an adversarial process, something a company does to its customers. Brand from the Inside builds this adversarial way of thinking into every page, but focuses on an employer brand, so that branding is now something a company does to its own employees. Despite the promise in the title, it never occurred to the authors that employees can help build or vet a company’s brand identity. Readers who are taken in by the promise in the title and expect to find a process by which a company can build a strong, authentic, organic internal brand will be disappointed. Passive readers will find themselves seeing customer and employee alike as obstacles to success by the time they get through the first two chapters. To counteract this, readers may want to repeat to themselves after every page, “The customer is not the enemy. The employee is not the enemy.”

[Dan Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a terrific book that every company should read. It describes the benefits, process and details for developing an employer brand to strengthen the overall promises and messaging your company makes to customers and to itself. At times it is a bit belabored but I found that clever and ironic given the topic and the repetition necessary to grow a brand. A must read for HR, Marketing and Leadership professionals.

[Cari · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has many good ideas, but it's written in an incredibly boring way. There are gray boxes throughout the book with short, pithy examples, but they don't have any apparent relevance to the text surrounding them. I'm giving it three stars because the insights are good yet the writing leaves a lot to be desired.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book details how you go about setting up a strong brand for your workplace, necessary to attract the talent of the future. It has the flair and brilliance of Libby Sartain's approach to HR; I wish more HR leaders would follow her lead.