While organizations invest a lot of resources into their brand, brand awareness and standards often aren’t as big a priority for the organization at large outside of sales and marketing. The development and dissemination of the right brand are critical to the success of the business, but few groups or teams are specifically focused on doing so — and that’s a problem. The entire organization should be involved in promoting the brand and building trust. According to research from Accenture, lack of trust costs global brands $2.5 trillion per year — $756 billion is lost by companies in the U.S. alone. A strong brand is critical to both building sales and customer loyalty externally, as well as building company culture internally.
Brandon Hall Group Smartchoice® Gold Preferred Provider Absorb sees the LMS as a unique opportunity to help establish and sustain clear brand standards, both inside and outside the organization. An LMS that is built for both internal employees, as well as the extended enterprise (customers, resellers, franchisees, etc.), helps drive consistency.
Internal Brand Building
In light of today’s volatile labor market, one of the biggest challenges companies face right now retaining and engaging the people they currently have. According to Brandon Hall Group’s 2023 HCM Outlook survey, the number one concern organizations have when looking at the future of work is “improving the employee work experience,” and an area where there is the least optimism is “retaining the best people.” The LMS can be a tool to help address these issues.
For employees, the LMS environment itself should exhibit the brand while at the same time providing consistent, standardized training on brand and messaging. Using the LMS as a single source of truth for branding keeps the message from getting disjointed or diluted coming from multiple sources. The training can ensure a clear understanding of the brand across all employees and provide training on how to position the brand in the market. It can also help train employees to be brand ambassadors. For an example of how Absorb was able to help a client reimagine the learning environment to better meet learner needs, check out this case study.
External Brand Building
For the extended enterprise, an LMS plays an even more important role in brand consistency and awareness since the audiences are not employees. For partner and reseller audiences, training via the LMS helps grow brand equity and loyalty. Using the LMS to train partners, resellers and especially customers provides an opportunity to build brand awareness and loyalty via a consistently high-quality, on-brand experience. This kind of training augments the capabilities of the organization’s corporate communication efforts, amplifying the brand. The LMS is also an effective way to quickly disseminate any updates to the branding or messaging to a wide variety of audiences simultaneously.
One area where brand consistency is critical is among franchisees. Absorb works with many organizations operating in this model, and they leverage the LMS to ensure each location is living up to the customers’ expectations of the brand, regardless of who owns it. You can see just how Absorb gets it done with their client A&W Canada in this case study.
Absorb’s clients leverage the platform’s ability to provide customized experiences for each audience to ensure that employees, customers, and partners are all getting the branded experience that is right for them. Absorb LMS equips administrators with the tools to customize lessons to a team’s needs, including documents, videos, live webinars, and more. These delivery formats can help learners digest elements of the organization’s brand, internally for employees and externally for partners, franchises, members, etc. And the Absorb LMS helps administrators understand if those trainings are effective. Advanced tracking tools, customizable dashboards, integrations, and analytics will help you measure your ROI and monitor trainee progress.
Ultimately, a strong brand is dependent on consistency. Building that brand consistency into the LMS experience ensures that the organization can have tight control over what that brand is and how it is leveraged.
