So you’ve decided to to start taking a serious look at your corporate brand and you are left with the task of assembling your branding team. Your branding team is a group of individuals pulled from your brand’s stakeholders. They would be gleamed from the three essential groups: employees, suppliers and customers.
One of the issues you will have at the end of your branding process is buy-in among employees. Stand back and take a visual on your employee group. Most are your garden-variety employee, but a few, while good workers are out-spoken and quick to judge. Other employees look to them for direction. They typically see initiatives coming down from the corner office as “just more work”. They do their best to put a negative spin on the initiatives and are a drag to getting things done. We call these folks, “wrenches” because they throw a monkey wrench into everything you do.
The trick is to include the Wrenches in the branding process. The theory is simple and basic – you want the wrenches to become advocates for the brand initiatives. If they are part of the solution, then they will use their energies to push it through to the employees stakeholders. Just imagine how empowered they will feel being included in the high-level branding sessions with the leaders of the company in attendance – actually wanting their valuable input.
Now, when the brand process is complete and ready to roll roll out to the employees, you have their key mouthpiece on your team. That monkey wrench is now a brand hero – everybody wins.



When were kids every day was an adventure. The neighbourhood was filled with other kids our age and we played different games all the time. We climbed trees, ran short-cuts through other properties, raided fruit trees – all kinds of kid things. One thing that was consistent was our reliance on one another. There was a kid’s code on everything. How we shared and how we helped one another. One area that strikes me as a great lesson that I took into adulthood was boosting. When ever us kids found it hard to shimmy up a tree, or found the fence just a little too tall, we’d look back over our shoulder and ask our closest buddy, “hey, can ya gimmie a boost?” At the time it was a simple forgetable request. But looking back now, I realize that it was a great lesson in trust, humility and charity. 





