Be Bold & Win

*** Guest post by Flame Conference 2012 speaker, Shaun Smith ***

"To emotionally bond with your customers, you must first engage your employees. So how do you create customer experiences that create an emotional bond with your brand? Here’s one way: Having a purpose beyond profit. This may come as a shock but most employees do not leap out of bed in the morning excited by the prospect of making more profit for their organisation that day. Profit may motivate senior executives but it rarely does so for the front-line unless they are shareholders too, as in the case of the John Lewis Partnership.

What motivates employees is feeling connected to the brand promise. That can be ‘Delivering Happiness’ as in the case of Zappos or ‘saving the planet’ as in the case of the World Wildlife Fund. If you ask employees of Umpqua – the community bank based in Oregon – what their brand promise is, they will tell you ‘making customers feel dealing with Umpqua was the best thing that happened today’. Quite a tall order for a bank!

Connecting people to a purpose is an important way of helping them feel good about your brand and we know from our research that there is about an 85% correlation between the way your employees feel about the brand and the way your customers do.

One organisation that understands this relationship is the mobile phone operator O2, as CEO Ronan Dunne explains: “If you cannot turn your employees into fans there’s no way you will turn your customers into fans.”


The co-author of the award-winning book 'BOLD, how to be brave in business and win', Shaun Smith, is delivering a high-octane general session by the same title at the FIA Conference. Be prepared to learn how to be bold and win from some of the very best.

Book your place now or call 020 7420 8560 for more details.