Engagement Strategies Media: Resources

This new book, Understanding and Reporting Human Capital, by a retired senior financial executive dedicated to human capital aims to provide a practical framework “that uses the input, activity, output, and outcome business model for integrated reporting and demonstrates how the model can be populated with relevant metrics, including emerging areas such as organizational culture.”

Nick. A. Shepherd is one of the first in the accounting professional to call for better management, measurement and reporting on human capital. A retired chief financial officer with extensive senior management experience, a Fellow of the Chartered Professional Accounts of Ontario, author of over a half-dozen publications on culture and human capital, he is one of a growing group in the financial profession recognizing the importance of addressing the current enormous gap in financial reporting: people. See ESM: Have Accountants Lost Their Balance?

His new book suggests how to address the growing demand for new metrics that deal with people as a critical organizational resource, driven, he believes, by:

• “The growth of intangibles, including human capital as core drivers of value creation.

• The inadequacy of existing reporting approaches to disclose the important risks related to people, to users such as investors, regulators, and others.

• The changing attitudes in society to the quality of relationships between corporate entities and the people they employ and impact.”

Shepherd’s book provides an overview of existing metrics including ISO 30414 human capital reporting, the GRI, World Economic Forum and others. He explains what he feels to be their inadequacies and provides his own prescriptions. He suggests a model for metrics that starts to align with integrated reporting <IR> and embraces the role that people perform in sustainable organizational value and value creation. The book addresses critical emerging issues such as organizational culture and “entire system” performance.

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Master the “S” of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), A.k.a. Stakeholder Capitalism

The Enterprise Engagement Alliance at TheEEA.org is the world’s first and only organization that focuses on outreach, certification and training, and advisory services to help organizations achieve their goals by fostering the proactive involvement of all stakeholders. This includes customers, employees, distribution and supply chain partners, and communities, or anyone connected to an organization’s success.

Training and Thought Leadership

Founded in 2008, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance provides outreach, learning and certification in Enterprise Engagement, an implementation process for the “S” or Social of Stakeholder Capitalism and Human Capital Management and measurement of engagement across the organization.
The Enterprise Engagement Alliance provides a training and certification program for business leaders, practitioners, and solution providers, as well as executive briefings and human capital gap analyses for senior leaders.
The EEA produces an education program for CFOs for the CFO.University training program on Human Capital Management.
Join the EEA to become a leader in the implementation of the “S” of ESG and Stakeholder Capitalism.

Engagement Digital Media and Marketplaces

The ESM information portal and The Enterprise Engagement Advisors Network solution provider marketplace cover all aspects of stakeholder engagement, and the EEA information library lists dozens of resources.
The RRN information portal and Brand Media Coalition marketplace address the use of brands for gifting, incentives, recognition, and promotions. The BMC information library provides information and research resources.

Video Learning

The EEA Human Capital Management and ROI of Engagement YouTube channel features a growing library of 30- to 60-minute panel discussions with leading experts in all areas of engagement and total rewards.

Books

Enterprise Engagement for CEOs: The Little Blue Book for People-Centric Capitalists. A quick guide for CEOs.
Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap 5th Edition implementation guide. A comprehensive textbook for practitioners, academics, and students.

Enterprise Engagement Advisory Services

The Engagement Agency helps:

Organizations of all types develop strategic Stakeholder Capitalism and Enterprise Engagement processes and human capital management and reporting strategies; conduct human capital gap analyses; design and implement strategic human capital management and reporting plans that address DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and assist with managed outsourcing of engagement products and services.
Human resources, sales and marketing solution providers profit from the emerging discipline of human capital management and ROI of engagement through training and marketing services.
Investors make sense of human capital reporting by public companies.
Buyers and sellers of companies in the engagement space or business owners or buyers who seek to account for human capital in their mergers and acquistions.

For more information: Contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheICEE.org or call 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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New Book Guides Implementation of Knowledge Management

This book is designed to help organizations of all sizes design and implement an effective system for collecting and sharing employee knowledge—a strategy that is even more critical in the work-from-home environment.

Design Knowledge Management System: A Practical Guide for Implementing the ISO 30410 Knowledge Management Standard provides a practical guide to applying the concepts and theories of knowledge management to practical business applications based on the 20-plus years of experience of its author Santhosh Shekar, Knowledge Management Architect at Petroleum Development in Oman.

The book provides practical insights into how to manage knowledge management functions, programs, projects, work paths and requirements. Readers will learn how to create effective knowledge management practices in conformance with the ISO 30410 ISO Knowledge Management standard. It also is designed to help individuals and organizations prepare for ISO 30410 certification.

The book addresses winning formulas for leadership to engage the entire enterprise in the knowledge sharing process and includes detailed questionnaires, checklists, illustrations, and models to understand and manage the issues involved with successful implementation. Design Knowledge Management System can help onboard somebody new to the field to help an organization profit from a strategy designed to enhance resilience.

Santhosh Shekar is the world’s second accredited auditor for the ISO 30401 Knowledge Management standard. He has extensive experience in developing knowledge management solutions, systems, processes, and methods for measuring return on investment in multiple industries with different challenges.

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Master the Principles of Enterprise Engagement to Achieve Organizational Goals and Enhance Your Career

Profit from a new strategic and systematic approach to engagement to profit from the principles of Stakeholder Capitalism, enhance your organization’s brand equity; increase sales, productivity, quality, innovation, and safety, and reduce risks.
Get trained to become a Chief Engagement Officer for your organization.
Learn how to create Sustainability or Integrated Reports for Your Organization or Clients.

Learning and Certification: The Enterprise Engagement Alliance 2.0 education program, the only learning and certification platform for boards, executives, and managers seeking to understand the implementation principles of Stakeholder Capitalism, human capital management and measurement, and ROI of engagement. For more information, contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheICEE.org or 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

Resources:
ESM at EnterpriseEngagement.org, an online trade publication founded in 2008 that features news, profiles, research, and more on the field of Enterprise Engagement, the implementation process for Stakeholder Engagement, and the EEXAdvisors.com buyer's guide and resource directory. This includes a comprehensive resource library on Stakeholder Capitalism, human capital management, measurement, and ROI of engagement.

RRN at RewardsRecognitionNetwork.com, an online trade publication founded in 1996 that features news, profiles, research and more on rewards, recognition, gifting and brand media, and the Brand Media Coalition, the only guide to the story-telling power of brands and where to source them for business, event, promotional gifting, and rewards and recognition. This features a comprehensive resource library on brand media, rewards, recognition, incentives, gifting and more.

The Enterprise Engagement Alliance Human Capital Management and ROI of Engagement Youtube channel featuring one-hour and 30-minute panel discussions with experts on multiple topics on Stakeholder Capitalism, Human Capital Management reporting and measurement, and engagement tactics.

Books:

Enterprise Engagement for CEOs:The Little Blue Book for People-Centric Capitalists
This is the definitive implementation guide to Stakeholder Capitalism, written specifically to provide CEOs and their leadership teams a concise overview of the framework, economics, and implementation process of a CEO-led strategic and systematic approach to achieving success through people. (123 pages, $15.99)

Services:
•  The International Center for Enterprise Engagement at TheICEE.org, offering: ISO 10018 certification for employers, solution providers, and Enterprise Engagement technology platforms; Human Resources and Human Capital audits for organizations seeking to benchmark their practices and related Advisory services for the hospitality field.
•  The Engagement Agency at EngagementAgency.net, offering: complete support services for employers, solution providers, and technology firms seeking to profit from formal human capital management, reporting, and ROI of engagement practices for themselves or their clients, including Brand Alignment audits for brands and Capability audits for solution providers to make sure their products and services are up to date.
•  C-Suite Advisory Services—Education of boards, investors, and C-suite executives on the economics, framework, and implementation processes of Enterprise Engagement.
•  Speakers Bureau—Select the right speaker on any aspect of engagement for your next event.
•  Mergers and Acquisitions. The Engagement Agency’s Mergers and Acquisition group focuses on helping organizations focused on people sell to the right buyer and on assisting engagement solution providers seeking an exit or merger. Contact Michael Mazer in confidence if your company is potentially for sale at 303-320-3777.

Enterprise Engagement Benchmark Tools: The Enterprise Engagement Alliance offers three tools to help organizations profit from Engagement. Click here to access the tools.
•  ROI of Engagement Calculator. Use this tool to determine the potential return-on-investment of an engagement strategy.
•  EE Benchmark Indicator. Confidentially benchmark your organization’s Enterprise Engagement practices against organizations and best practices.
•  Compare Your Company’s Level of Engagement. Quickly compare your organization’s level of engagement to those of others based on the same criteria as the EEA’s Engaged Company Stock Index.
•  Gauge Your Personal Level of Engagement. This survey, donated by Horsepower, enables individuals to gauge their own personal levels of engagement.

For more information, contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheICEE.org, 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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New Book Focuses on "Making Things Right at Work"

This book by Gary Chapman, Jennifer M Thomas, and Dr. Paul White, founder and CEO of culture company Appreciation at Work, provides guidance on how to reduce conflict at work.

Making Things Right at Work: Increase Teamwork, Resolve Conflict, and Build Trust addresses the challenges of conflict at work at how to address it.

According to co-author Dr. Paul White, “Conflict at work happens—a lot. And it is a major source of stress for both supervisors and employees. In fact, it shouldn’t take you but a few seconds to

recall a tense moment in your workplace.”

Dr. White believes “The cost of workplace conflict is huge—both to us as individuals and to our organizations. One study found that, on average, each employee spends 2.1 hours every week (or one day per month) dealing with conflict in some way—either being directly involved in a disagreement or managing an issue between coworkers.”

In addition to the time lost dealing with conflict, “there is the personal cost of the stress in terms of

headaches, upset stomachs, high blood pressure, and loss of sleep.”

Making Things Right at Work is written to help readers understand the sources of conflict, how to keep conflicts from “exploding” out of control and provides practical ways to calm the waters. Topics covered include:

1. Where do conflicts come from?

2. How to keep conflicts from exploding?

3. What to do when you’ve messed up?

4. How to get past hurt and offense?

5. Building and rebuilding trust?

Dr. White’s Appreciation at Work advisory service provides customized presentations for organizations seeking to help employees address these and other conflict-related issues.

For More Information

Paul White, Ph.D.

President, Appreciation at Work

Appreciationatwork.com

316-681-4431

paul@drpaulwhite.com

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Master the “S” of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), A.k.a. Stakeholder Capitalism

Training and Thought Leadership

Founded in 2008, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance provides outreach, learning and certification in Enterprise Engagement, an implementation process for the “S” or Social of Stakeholder Capitalism and Human Capital Management and measurement of engagement across the organization.
The Enterprise Engagement Alliance provides a training and certification program for business leaders, practitioners, and solution providers, as well as executive briefings and human capital gap analyses for senior leaders.
The EEA produces an education program for CFOs for the CFO.University training program on Human Capital Management.
Join the EEA to become a leader in the implementation of the “S” of ESG and Stakeholder Capitalism.

Engagement Digital Media and Marketplaces

The ESM information portal and The Enterprise Engagement Advisors Network solution provider marketplace cover all aspects of stakeholder engagement, and the EEA information library lists dozens of resources.
The RRN information portal and Brand Media Coalition marketplace address the use of brands for gifting, incentives, recognition, and promotions. The BMC information library provides information and research resources.

Video Learning

Books

Enterprise Engagement for CEOs: The Little Blue Book for People-Centric Capitalists. A quick guide for CEOs.
Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap 5th Edition implementation guide. A comprehensive textbook for practitioners, academics, and students.

Enterprise Engagement Advisory Services

The Engagement Agency helps:

Organizations of all types develop strategic Stakeholder Capitalism and Enterprise Engagement processes and human capital management and reporting strategies; conduct human capital gap analyses; design and implement strategic human capital management and reporting plans that address DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and assist with managed outsourcing of engagement products and services.
Human resources, sales and marketing solution providers profit from the emerging discipline of human capital management and ROI of engagement through training and marketing services.
Investors make sense of human capital reporting by public companies.
Buyers and sellers of companies in the engagement space or business owners or buyers who seek to account for human capital in their mergers and acquistions.

For more information: Contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheICEE.org or call 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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Enterprise Engagement for CEOs Outlines Stakeholder Capitalism Implementation

The Enterprise Engagement Alliance’s newly updated Enterprise Engagement for CEOs: The Little Blue Book for Stakeholder Capitalists provides boards and senior management with a short course on how to turn theory into action. A recent survey by the Conference Board found that 92% of CEOs agree with the shift to Stakeholder Capitalism and 82% say they have begun the implementation process.

Enterprise Engagement for CE0s: The Little Blue Book for Stakeholder Capitalists provides a practical overview of how to implement the “S” of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), increasingly known as Stakeholder Capitalism. Click here to order in paperback or Kindle.

The book provides a short, practical overview of how to use Enterprise Engagement principles to increase profitability and lower costs by establishing a brand that attracts and retains highly committed, focused, and capable customers, employees, distribution and supply chain partners, and communities. The processes are based on the proven approach applied by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standards to help enhance quality, environmental, and safety practices in manufacturing.

For those seeking a comprehensive textbook on all aspects of implementation, see: Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap—How to Implement Stakeholder Capitalism and Enhance Organizational Results Through a Strategic Approach to People Management.

This increasingly important approach to business is not about “woke” capitalism; donating more money to charities or lowering an organization’s carbon footprint in reaction to societal pressures. It’s backed by over 30 years of academic research and ISO (International Organization for Standardization)-based business practices aimed at enhancing sustainable returns for shareholders by creating value for customers, employees, supply chain and distribution partners, communities, and the environment—otherwise known as Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) management, increasingly known as Stakeholder Capitalism.

Multiple books have documented the economics of Stakeholder Capitalism, including the book by that name authored by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum or The Heart of Business, by Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy, another committed Stakeholder Capitalist. Enterprise Engagement for CEOs is designed for management that seeks to move from theory to practical applications. Based on the experience of literally millions of companies that have used or use ISO standards in one way or other, success depends on having a CEO-led strategic and systematic approach to achieving goals by strategically and systematically addressing the interests of all stakeholders.

Enterprise Engagement for CEOs is for boards, executives, management in all areas, and educators seeking to go beyond the talk to focus on the actual implementation process. The enterprise approach to engaging all stakeholders in a systematic way is based on extensive academic work and case studies of successful organizations going back to the early work of R. Edward Freeman, Professor of Business Administration, that demonstrate the ability to enhance performance and lower costs by:

• Establishing a clear organizational purpose baked into the culture and business plans.

• Strategically aligning the interests and activities related to all stakeholders, rather than having them siloed between marketing, sales, human resources, operations, finance, etc.

• Baking people strategies and tactics into the organization’s business operating system.

• Creating a culture of continuous improvement that encourages the voice of all stakeholders, including front-line workers and other employees; customers; supply chain and distribution partners, and communities.

• Having a formal system for managing people investments, the strategies and tactics, and performance metrics.

Click here to order Enterprise Engagement for CEOs in paperback or Kindle.

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Master the “S” of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), A.k.a. Stakeholder Capitalism

Training and Thought Leadership

Founded in 2008, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance provides outreach, learning and certification in Enterprise Engagement, an implementation process for the “S” or Social of Stakeholder Capitalism and Human Capital Management and measurement of engagement across the organization.
The Enterprise Engagement Alliance provides a training and certification program for business leaders, practitioners, and solution providers, as well as executive briefings and human capital gap analyses for senior leaders.
The EEA produces an education program for CFOs for the CFO.University training program on Human Capital Management.
Join the EEA to become a leader in the implementation of the “S” of ESG and Stakeholder Capitalism.

Engagement Digital Media and Marketplaces

The ESM information portal and The Enterprise Engagement Advisors Network solution provider marketplace cover all aspects of stakeholder engagement, and the EEA information library lists dozens of resources.
The RRN information portal and Brand Media Coalition marketplace address the use of brands for gifting, incentives, recognition, and promotions. The BMC information library provides information and research resources.

Video Learning

Books

Enterprise Engagement for CEOs: The Little Blue Book for People-Centric Capitalists. A quick guide for CEOs.
Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap 5th Edition implementation guide. A comprehensive textbook for practitioners, academics, and students.

Enterprise Engagement Advisory Services

The Engagement Agency helps:

Organizations of all types develop strategic Stakeholder Capitalism and Enterprise Engagement processes and human capital management and reporting strategies; conduct human capital gap analyses; design and implement strategic human capital management and reporting plans that address DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and assist with managed outsourcing of engagement products and services.
Human resources, sales and marketing solution providers profit from the emerging discipline of human capital management and ROI of engagement through training and marketing services.
Investors make sense of human capital reporting by public companies.
Buyers and sellers of companies in the engagement space or business owners or buyers who seek to account for human capital in their mergers and acquistions.

For more information: Contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheICEE.org or call 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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Now Available: The Essential Guide to Implementation of Stakeholder Capitalism

Last week, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance released its updated Enterprise Engagement for CEOs: The Little Blue Book for Stakeholder Capitalists. This week, it has published its updated Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap—How to Implement Stakeholder Capitalism to provide management at all levels a comprehensive implementation guide with detailed information on the theory, economics, and practices of Stakeholder Capitalism and human capital management across the enterprise.

While Enterprise Engagement for CEOs provides an abbreviated overview of the principles of Stakeholder Capitalism and profiles of some of the CEOs who have practiced it at their organizations, Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap offers a practical detailed implementation guide that includes information on the principles and economics, as well as on almost all of the tactics involved.

The challenge facing the Stakeholder Capitalism movement is that it is not taught in any schools nor even in executive education program and that it requires organizations to break down the siloes between finance, marketing, human resources, operations, and other business units that hamper efficiency and create poor experiences for customers and employees alike.

Stakeholder Capitalism enhances returns for investors by creating value for customers, employees, supply chain and distribution partners, communities, and the environment and should not be confused with “woke” capitalism or Corporate Social Responsibility. See ESM: Stakeholder Capitalism—A Primer.

Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap aims to address the knowledge gap with a desk reference covering almost all the key areas of the field. Writes Grace Swanson, Vice President, Human Capital at Accumold, a leading precision manufacturer, “By the time I finished reading Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap my copy was filled with Post-it notes highlighting information I knew I would need to reference later. This book provides a complete guide to almost everything an organization needs to implement a strategic approach to engaging everyone in organizational goals in a systematic way.”

Gary Rhoads, retired Stephen Mack Covey Professor of Marketing Emeritus at the Marriot School of Business at Brigham Young University and Chairman of Xvoyant, a sales engagement technology firm, “As a professor of marketing and entrepreneurship for most of my career, and founder of two leading companies in sales and marketing management, I know that delivering promises is one of the most critical strategies for success. Yet too many organizations fail to address the importance of engaging all stakeholders in organizational goals. Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap is the only book I know that focuses on how to apply a strategic and tactical approach to engagement across the enterprise in a systematic way.”

Adds Barbara Porter, Managing Director, Ernst & Young, "I have spent much of my career helping organizations develop great cultures, and in the end a successful strategy requires a CEO-led approach to connecting employees, managers, customers, vendors, suppliers, the community—everyone inside and outside the organization who has a stake in its success. I have repeatedly referenced almost every chapter in Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap since the first edition came out, as it’s the only book I know of that puts together in one place all the tactics needed to address engagement to achieve organizational results.”

As shown in the table of contents below, the book covers almost every topic involved with the implementation of Stakeholder Capitalism, including career opportunities and the potential impact on government. The edition now includes appendices on human capital management, reporting, and analysis.

Here is the table of contents:

Part I: Introduction to Stakeholder Capitalism, Enterprise Engagement, ISO

Intro: Enterprise Engagement and ISO Annex SL and ISO 10018 and ISO 30414

Standards – A Practical Framework for Implementation and Measurement

Chapter 1 ISO 10018: People Engagement

Chapter 2 The Role of ISO Standards in Business and People Management

Chapter 3 Economics of Enterprise Engagement

Chapter 4 Culture and the Enterprise Brand

Chapter 5 Breaking Down Organizational Silos

Part II: Audiences of Engagement

Intro: The Audience Challenge

Chapter 6 Customer Engagement

Chapter 7 Channel Partner Engagement

Chapter 8 Employee Engagement

Chapter 9 Sales Engagement

Chapter 10 Volunteer & Community Engagement

Chapter 11 Supply Chain Engagement

Chapter 12 The Employee / Customer Link

Chapter 13 Case Study: Northwell Health

Part III: Tools of Engagement

Intro: Tools and Tactics

Chapter 14 Employee Assessment

Chapter 15 Communication

Chapter 16 Permission Management

Chapter 17 Content Marketing

Chapter 18 Learning and Training

Chapter 19 Gamification

Chapter 20 Collaboration and Innovation

Chapter 21 Rewards & Recognition

Chapter 22 Loyalty

Chapter 23 Recognition in the Era of Employee Engagement

Chapter 24 Diversity and Community

Chapter 25 Wellness

Chapter 26 Enterprise Safety Engagement

Chapter 27 Enterprise Technology Engagement

Chapter 28 Meetings and Motivational Events

Chapter 29 Travel Rewards and Engagement

Chapter 30 The Importance of an Engaging Environment

Chapter 31 Trade Shows & Conferences: Engaging the Stakeholders

Chapter 32 Technology: The Heart of the Problem, The Core of the Solution

Chapter 33 Measuring Enterprise Engagement and Performance

Chapter 34 Big Data and Analytics

Chapter 35 Case Study: UnitedHealth Group

Part IV: Applications of Engagement

Intro: The Enterprise Engagement Framework

Chapter 36 Keys to Implementation

Chapter 37 Budgeting and ROI

Chapter 38 Engagement Careers

Chapter 39 Engagement and Nonprofits

Chapter 40 Implications for Government

Chapter 41 Engagement, Human Capital and the Accounting Profession

Chapter 42 Enterprise Engagement and ISO 30414 Human Capital Reporting Standards

Appendix 1 Sample Engagement Business Plan

Appendix 2 An Explanation of Tracer Audit Methodology

Appendix 3 ISO 10018 Audit

Appendix 4 Human Capital Evaluation Checklist

Appendix 5 Example of a “Model” Company

For More Information

Bruce Bolger

Founder, Enterprise Engagement Alliance

914-591-7600, ext. 230

Bolger@The ICEE.org

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Master the “S” of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), A.k.a. Stakeholder Capitalism

Training and Thought Leadership

Founded in 2008, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance provides outreach, learning and certification in Enterprise Engagement, an implementation process for the “S” or Social of Stakeholder Capitalism and Human Capital Management and measurement of engagement across the organization.
The Enterprise Engagement Alliance provides a training and certification program for business leaders, practitioners, and solution providers, as well as executive briefings and human capital gap analyses for senior leaders.
The EEA produces an education program for CFOs for the CFO.University training program on Human Capital Management.
Join the EEA to become a leader in the implementation of the “S” of ESG and Stakeholder Capitalism.

Engagement Digital Media and Marketplaces

The ESM information portal and The Enterprise Engagement Advisors Network solution provider marketplace cover all aspects of stakeholder engagement, and the EEA information library lists dozens of resources.
The RRN information portal and Brand Media Coalition marketplace address the use of brands for gifting, incentives, recognition, and promotions. The BMC information library provides information and research resources.

Video Learning

Books

Enterprise Engagement for CEOs: The Little Blue Book for People-Centric Capitalists. A quick guide for CEOs.
Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap 5th Edition implementation guide. A comprehensive textbook for practitioners, academics, and students.

Enterprise Engagement Advisory Services

The Engagement Agency helps:

Organizations of all types develop strategic Stakeholder Capitalism and Enterprise Engagement processes and human capital management and reporting strategies; conduct human capital gap analyses; design and implement strategic human capital management and reporting plans that address DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and assist with managed outsourcing of engagement products and services.
Human resources, sales and marketing solution providers profit from the emerging discipline of human capital management and ROI of engagement through training and marketing services.
Investors make sense of human capital reporting by public companies.
Buyers and sellers of companies in the engagement space or business owners or buyers who seek to account for human capital in their mergers and acquistions.

For more information: Contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheICEE.org or call 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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Have Accountants Lost Their Balance? What's Missing From Financial Reports

A new book by author Nick Shepherd, an accomplished finance professional, asserts that today’s accounting profession is failing to report on what truly counts: human capital.

Audit Reports Lack Meaning
How to Improve Financial Reporting
Accounting for the Unaccounted for

Accounting has lost touch with reality, asserts Nick Shepherd, in his new book, How Accountants Lost Their Balance. Shepherd is a retired financial officer with decades of practical management experience and is a Fellow of the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada in Ontario. He is also an active proponent of the concept of Integrated Reporting.

“The days of relying on audits and financial reporting to verify the health of a company are no longer enough. Relying on an audit to verify that a business is a going concern has proven to be clearly misleading,” Shepherd writes.

“The application of financial standards to the way that cash is used in today’s organizations fails to disclose the significance of investments in the key intangible assets that form a critical part of today’s business model. The risk to business continuity posed by maximizing profitability while depleting critical intangible resources is often not discovered until the damage is done. Inadequate attention to human behavior as a key element of internal controls can result in unplanned surprises and unethical conduct,” he asserts.

While the world has changed over the last fifty years, he says, “the profession of accounting has become less relevant and no longer fit-for-purpose. There are clearly cracks in its’ ability to demonstrate that it remains independent, objective, and aligned with societal expectations of ethical behavior.”

Audit Reports Lack Meaning

As a result, he argues, audit reports are no longer a quality stamp of approval on a set of accounts. “Financial records that used to underpin some 95% of an organizations market value, today only represent about 15%. While this 15% of value at risk remains well recorded, visible, and verifiable by accounting, the balance of 85% is represented by something else: something that cost money to create, but for which there are no financial records. When the money was spent it was written off against current year earnings, depleted shareholders’ equity, and reduced accounting value. Yet for the investor, if it was developed and nurtured, it created value.”

Organizations, he points out, “have spent billions creating global supply chains and in developing state-of-the-art processes. They have spent billions in developing managers and leaders to create an innovative, responsive, and creative workforce, as well as developing the skills and capabilities of the workforce. They have invested large sums to identify, collect, develop, and use the knowledge contained within and about their organization. They have spent billions building their brand and with it their reputation and customer loyalty. Yet almost none of this is reflected as an organizational asset. It is there. It cost money to create. It contributes to the creation of value. But it disappears from the financial records.”

The income statement used to explain how the profit was generated, he points out. How much revenue was billed, and the expenses incurred to generate that revenue. Not anymore. Many of the expenses charged against income today are costs incurred to create income in the future.

How to Improve Financial Reporting

This book explains how the economy and structure of business has changed and how the practise of accounting, especially financial reporting, has failed to adapt. It suggests a number of improvements.

Firstly, reporting of expenses must be expanded and improved to explain “where the money went,” he says. How much was invested to earn current income? How much was spent to build the intangible assets and how much was spent to sustain these assets? The gross aggregation of payroll costs is no longer acceptable.

Second, he continues, “accounting must embrace the reporting of intangible assets that consume a significant portion of an organizations cash flow and which contribute a substantial portion of market value. There must be some explanation of where all the investment went to create these intangible assets, and some level of transparency as to their continued existence and health as drivers of value creation.”

Accounting must also lead the effort to create a bridge between financial reporting of intangibles and the growing use of non-financial indicators, he adds. “If an organization is making training commitments, how much expense is this consuming and what is its impact on current earnings and the value of the workforce? How much revenue is being generated from new products and services and how does this compare to the investment being made to create a climate for innovation and creativity? How much investment has been made in supply chain’s and how do these impact innovation, creativity, and earnings?”

Accounting for the Unaccounted for

The reasons for change are apparent when considering that the stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google “collectively are worth close to $5 trillion, yet their financial records reflect about less than 10% of that. Their brand values alone are worth about ¾ of a billion dollars, yet even that amount is not recorded, audited, or reported as part of an annual report.”

Shepherd says, “New approaches to corporate reporting have been developing over the last thirty years that have identified many of these non-financial resources that are strategically critical. These reports provide some level of insight into what these intangible assets are, but there remains no link between these reports and the financial records.”

There is much talk about integrated thinking and integrated reporting, but real resource integration, which is what business leaders do on a day-to-day basis, remains a collection of stand-alone performance indicators, he argues.

Shepherd’s book suggests where the gaps might be and what types of changes could be made to work towards more realistic integration. The author addresses:

• How the flow of funds has shifted from tangible “bricks and machinery” to intangible people, processes, and relationships.

• How these investments by management have created operational assets that form the core of today’s business model.

• How investments continue to be made in keeping these underlying capabilities healthy.

• How effective management is managing the risks among all the key resources, to ensure system sustainability while optimizing performance.

“Change is a journey,” he writes. “The journey for the accounting profession must include a reflection of its underlying principles and the development of an approach that provides valuable information that adds value to both the internal decision maker and the external investor.”

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Master the Principles of Enterprise Engagement to Achieve Organizational Goals and Enhance Your Career

Profit from a new strategic and systematic approach to engagement to profit from the principles of Stakeholder Capitalism, enhance your organization’s brand equity; increase sales, productivity, quality, innovation, and safety, and reduce risks.
Get trained to become a Chief Engagement Officer for your organization.
Learn how to create Sustainability or Integrated Reports for Your Organization or Clients.

Books:

For more information, contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheICEE.org, 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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Two New Books Advocate Stakeholder Capitalism

Professors from Harvard Business School, University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and George Washington University author books that include the fundamental need for CEOs to lead a strategic and systematic approach to addressing the needs of all stakeholders.

The financial and societal benefits of a stakeholder approach to Capitalism is front and center in these two recently published books.

In Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, the author Rebecca Henderson argues that companies have to move beyond maximizing profits to identify business opportunities to meet society’s needs, and that they should consider the welfare of all stakeholders. Investors, she asserts, will benefit by focusing on the long term and considering social and environmental impact. She believes that governments need to regulate markets more strictly and impose carbon taxes. The solution to failing capitalism, she says, lies in all sectors working together to address challenges through collective action, with the result being not only a better world but more profitable businesses and a stronger economy.

Rebecca Henderson is the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University.

The Power of AND: Responsible Business Without Trade-Offs, by R. Edward Freeman, Kirsten E. Martin, and Bidhan L. Parmar, detail an emerging business model built on:

• Prioritizing purpose as well as profits;

• Creating value for stakeholders as well as shareholders;

• Seeing business as embedded in society as well as markets;

• Recognizing people’s full humanity as well as their economic interests, and

• Integrating business and ethics into a more holistic model.

Drawing on examples from multiple companies, industries, and countries, the authors seek to demonstrate that these values support resilience and prosperity over the long term. They share real-world success stories they say disprove the conventional wisdom that there are unavoidable trade-offs between acting ethically and succeeding financially. The Power of And is written to present a conceptual revolution about what it means for business to be responsible, providing a new story to help all kinds of companies thrive.

R. Edward Freeman is University Professor and Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Kirsten E. Martin is associate professor of strategic management and public policy at the George Washington University’s School of Business. Bidhan L. Parmar is associate professor of business administration at University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

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Master the Principles of Stakeholder Capitalism And Implementation Through Enterprise Engagement

Education, Certifications, and Information to Activate

Stakeholder Capitalism Available Nowhere Else

A complete learning, certification, and information program and a course syllabus for educators.

Training and Certification

Enterprise Engagement Alliance Education: Certified Engagement Practitioner; Advanced Engaged Practitioner, and Certified Engagement Solution Provider learning and certification programs on how to implement Stakeholder Capitalism principles at the tactical level.

International Center for Enterprise Engagement: The only training and certification program for ISO 30414 human capital reporting and ISO 10018 quality people management certification.

The EEA offers a complimentary course syllabus for educators.

Join the EEA to begin your certification process or see our other resources below.

Or contact Bruce Bolger; Bolger@TheICEE.org; 914-591-7600, ext. 230 to learn more.

THE ONLY BOOKS ON STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM IMPLEMENTATION

Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap 5th Edition
The first and most comprehensive book on Enterprise Engagement and the new ISO 9001 and ISO 10018 quality people management standards. Includes 36 chapters detailing how to better integrate and align engagement efforts across the enterprise. (312 pages, $36.)

OTHER RESOURCES TO ACTUALIZE STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM
Communities: The Enterprise Engagement Alliance and Advocate and the Brand Media Coalition free resource centers offering access to the latest research, news, and case studies; discounts, promotions, referrals, and commissions, when appropriate to third-party solution providers from participating coalition solution provider members.

Enterprise Engagement Resources: EEXAdvisors.com provides the only curated online marketplace to access hundreds of solution providers in all areas of human capital management and enterprise engagement throughout the world.

Online Overview:
10-minute short course: click here for a 10-minute introduction to Enterprise Engagement and ISO standards from the Coggno.com learning platform.

Services:
•  The Engagement Agency at EngagementAgency.net, offering: complete support services for employers, solution providers, and technology firms seeking to profit from formal engagement practices for themselves or their clients, including Brand and Capability audits for solution providers to make sure their products and services are up to date.
•  C-Suite Advisory Service—Education of boards, investors, and C-suite executives on the economics, framework, and implementation processes of Enterprise Engagement.
•  Speakers Bureau—Select the right speaker on any aspect of engagement for your next event.
•  Mergers and Acquisitions. The Engagement Agency’s Mergers and Acquisition group is aware of multiple companies seeking to purchase firms in the engagement field. Contact Michael Mazer in confidence if your company is potentially for sale at 303-320-3777.

Enterprise Engagement Benchmark Tools: The Enterprise Engagement Alliance offers three tools to help organizations profit from Engagement. Click here to access the tools.
•  ROI of Engagement Calculator. Use this tool to determine the potential return-on-investment of an engagement strategy.
•  EE Benchmark Indicator. Confidentially benchmark your organization’s Enterprise Engagement practices against organizations and best practices.
•  Compare Your Company’s Level of Engagement. Quickly compare your organization’s level of engagement to those of others based on the same criteria as the EEA’s Engaged Company Stock Index.
•  Gauge Your Personal Level of Engagement. This survey, donated by Horsepower, enables individuals to gauge their own personal levels of engagement.

For more information, contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheEEA.org, 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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New Books Focus on Gratitude, Culture, Experience-Led Enterprises, and People ROI

Four new books focus on: how gratitude can improve morale, efficiency and profitability; strategies to reduce organizational griping; a new approach to maximize the customer experience through a holistic approach, and how to better measure the value of human capital.

Turning Complaints Into Culture Change
The Convergence of Customer and Employee Experience
The ROI of People

A series of new books are now available on how to humanize the workplace.

In Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick’s new book, “Leading With Gratitude,’ the authors share research that shows that “gratitude boosts employee engagement, reduces turnover, and leads team members to express more gratitude to one another—strengthening team bonds.” The authors assert that studies “have also shown that gratitude is beneficial for those expressing it and is one of the most powerful variables in predicting a person’s overall well-being—above money, health, and optimism.” As an example, the authors site the WD-40 Company, whose leadership “gave thousands of managers training in expressing gratitude to their employees” and, as a result, “saw record increases in revenue.” The authors share eight ways that managers can show employees they are valued.

They highlight leaders such as Alan Mulally of Ford and Hubert Joly of Best Buy who they say have successfully incorporated the practice of gratitude into their leadership roles. The authors believe that showing gratitude “isn’t just about being nice, it’s about being smart—really smart—and it’s a skill that everyone can easily learn.” Elton and Gostick are the principles of The Culture Works, a culture advisory firm, and are well-known public speakers and authors.

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Turning Complaints Into Culture Change

In “How to Create a ‘No Complaining’ Organizational Culture…And Why it Will Be Good for Everyone,” author Scott Maurer provides what he says is a practical system that everyone in all levels of and organization can follow to pursue healthy sustainable culture change. Mauer is founder of Remedium Solutions, a culture advisory service. His approach focuses on teaching employees to recognize that frequent complaining among employees is a signal for the need for immediate culture change. The author argues that when complaining is addressed proactively, organizations can enjoy an increase in productivity, creativity, problem solving, employee health, morale, retention, engagement, and more. The book offers advice on how to focus on problem-solving, hold productive conversations to reduce tension, better understand relationship dynamics; streamline and align communications; improve self-awareness and emotional health, and establish formal or informal peer support structures to create a sense of purpose, loyalty, and employee well-being.

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The Convergence of Customer and Employee Experience

The new book, “In the Center of Experience: The Blueprint for Creating an Experience-Led Enterprise,” asserts that business is at an “inflection point in the relationship between brands and their audiences, where customers and employees are demanding better and more valuable experiences.” Author Greg Kihlstrom, President and Chief Experience Officer at Cravety, an agency focusing on employee and customer experience, says that “companies must keep up with this demand in order to remain competitive.” This, he says, includes competition for both customers as well as employees. He believes that organizations that start the customer experience process internally have the greatest potential to achieve long-term benefits.

The book is designed to provide a blueprint for organizations to implement a center of excellence incorporating brand experience, including the customer and employee experience. The book covers the following elements: brand, governance, culture, platform, measurement, and environment. The author provides recommendations on how organizations can implement their own “Centers of Experience” and how to measure success.

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The ROI of People

Dave Bookbinder, Senior Director of CFGI, a financial advisory company, argues for more focus on the value of human capital in business valuations. In his book, “The New ROI: Return on Individuals,” he points out that while many executives say that people are their organizations’ No. 1 assets, he believes that when it comes to valuations, most organizations put more value on patents and trademarks than on people. The book explores ways to put more quantifiable value on the value of human capital. This includes strategies to promote greater workforce value by creating “difference makers,” increasing employee success, improving happiness, reducing the impact of toxic employees, generating innovation through trust, embracing and improving corporate culture, and much more. Author Dave Bookbinder and over 20 collaborators share strategies to achieve these goals and new ways to quantify the value of human capital.

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Master the Principles of Enterprise Engagement to Achieve Organizational Goals and Enhance Your Career

Profit from a new strategic and systematic approach to engagement to enhance your organization’s brand equity; increase sales, productivity, quality, innovation, and safety, and reduce risks.
Get trained to become a Chief Engagement Officer for your organization.
Learn how to create Sustainability or Integrated Reports for Your Organization or Clients.

Resources: The Brand Media Coalition, the only guide to the story-telling power of brands and where to source them for business, event, promotional gifting, and rewards and recognition. Enterprise Engagement Solution Provider Directory. The only directory of engagement solution providers covering all types of agencies and tactics as well as insights on how to select them.

Communities: The Enterprise Engagement Alliance and Advocate and the Brand Media Coalition free resource centers offering access to the latest research, news, and case studies; discounts, promotions, referrals, and commissions, when appropriate to third-party solution providers from participating coalition solution provider members.

In Print:

Online:
10-minute short course: click here for a 10-minute introduction to Enterprise Engagement and ISO standards from the Coggno.com learning platform.

Services:
•  The International Center for Enterprise Engagement at TheICEE.org, offering: ISO 10018 certification for employers, solution providers, and Enterprise Engagement technology platforms; Human Resources and Human Capital audits for organizations seeking to benchmark their practices and related Advisory services for the hospitality field.
•  The Engagement Agency at EngagementAgency.net, offering: complete support services for employers, solution providers, and technology firms seeking to profit from formal engagement practices for themselves or their clients, including Brand and Capability audits for solution providers to make sure their products and services are up to date.
•  C-Suite Advisory Service—Education of boards, investors, and C-suite executives on the economics, framework, and implementation processes of Enterprise Engagement.
•  Speakers Bureau—Select the right speaker on any aspect of engagement for your next event.
•  Mergers and Acquisitions. The Engagement Agency’s Mergers and Acquisition group is aware of multiple companies seeking to purchase firms in the engagement field. Contact Michael Mazer in confidence if your company is potentially for sale at 303-320-3777.

For more information, contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheEEA.org, 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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Enterprise Engagement for CEOs Targets People-Centric Capitalists

With the right focus on the value of people, capitalism can create a virtuous circle of prosperity that surpasses the potential of any other system. Enterprise Engagement for CEOs is for a new generation of leaders and proud capitalists who don’t just say Human Capital is their organization’s most important asset, they know it. By Human Capital, I mean not just employees or customers, but all stakeholders ˗ distribution partners, vendors, communities and investors. In the case of not-profits, this also means donors and volunteers, and in government, constituents, political donors and volunteers.

Enterprise Engagement for CEOs is available now online at Amazon.com for $15.99 and is coming soon to most other online retailers.

E-Book: Is Your Brand Powerful Enough to Motivate and Inspire?

Does your CEO and CMO know that organizations spend $50 billion or more on brands for use in business, event, and promotional gifting, rewards and recognition programs that provide invaluable brand exposure and incremental business that most brands consistently overlook or undervalue?

Here’s a comprehensive guide for chief marketing officers, CEOs or business owners to help determine if your brand and products and services have what it takes to succeed in the emerging world of Brand Media in business, event, promotional gifting and rewards, and motivational meetings.

By Bruce Bolger, Founder, Brand Media Coalition,

A service of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance

What Is Brand Media
The Applications for Brand Media
Why So Few People Have Heard of a $50 Billion Industry
How Do You Know if Your Brand Is Good Enough?
What Is the Upside
What Are the Risks
Brand Media Industry Players
Steps to Success
Resources

Featured Advertisers:

Download a PDF of this White Paper:

Executive Summary

This white paper is written for CEOs and CMOs seeking new markets that leverage a company’s brand equity.
The gifting and award business is a measure of the value of a brand’s ability to generate significant revenue and profits based on the desire of another organization to use its products and services to thank, motivate, or reward its stakeholders.
Brand Media is a source of valuable brand exposure for any brand, company or service that other organizations can use to transparently and meaningfully thank, reward, inspire, or enrichen the lives or businesses of key stakeholders.
Brand Media sales can generate at least 5% to 10% of overall sales and in some cases more and provide valuable exposure for which your organization is paid.
The field has a low cost of entry and is easily tested with many reliable solution providers.
The biggest risk is improper use of or distribution of your brand.
The Brand Media is based on a 117-year-old market undergoing major growth in the era of one-to-one engagement and relationship building.

Imagine if organizations regularly called your sales organization; went to your web site or bought your products at retail specifically to motivate their customers, employees, vendors or communities? What if your brand had such perceived value that other organizations wanted to buy your products or services to market as a reward or gift to their most critical audiences in ongoing multi-media campaigns in print, online at events; or invite your company to set up a boutique at one of its most critical events to use your product or service as a gift or reward, or have it engraved or pad-printed so that people would be encouraged to use and value your brand for years or more? This happens every day in the $50 billion market for business gifts and rewards.

Simply because most chief marketing officers, let alone business people in general, have never heard of the market, many companies overlook what companies like Yeti, S’well, Bulova, and dozens of leading brands and retailers know: the corporate market for the use of brands as a business, event, gift, or reward media provides the best possible form of marketing exposure: the endorsement by other organizations that your products are worthy of a reward or gift they are happy to pay for to thank or reward people for performance. While many CMOs direct their staffs to give away products for contests and sweepstakes or product placements on television and movies in return for ephemeral exposure, they ignore the far more tangible, beneficial and sustainable strategy of selling their products and services as Brand Media.This is even more important in an era in which most traditional distribution channels have broken down.

The field of Brand Media provides a new way for CEOs to prove the value of their brand equity. The more powerful your brand either nationally, or in your community or trade, the more you can leverage it in the field of Brand Media. Companies say they can’t measure the dollar value of their brand equity? How much others are willing to spend to leverage that brand equity certainly is one tangible method.

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What Is Brand Media

The Brand Media field is the 21st-century name for what was known in the last century and still by most in the trade as premiums and incentives. This is a name which perhaps has helped relegate the field to the underbelly of marketing because it minimizes the powerful role brands can play in helping other brands tell their stories in business, event, and promotional gift and rewards and because its use over the past decades has done little to enhance the field’s visibility or legitimacy. (See report, “The Untapped Power of the New Brand Media.”)

Brand Media is the use of brands specifically to thank, award, and enable target audiences as part of strategic and systematic approach to engaging all stakeholders, customers, employees, distribution partners, vendors, communities, donors, volunteers, or just about anyone whose engagement can help an organization.

The issue of media comes into the definition because each brand in fact tells a story that when selectively used and promoted in a gift, promotion, or award program helps other brands tell their story. Example: a young software startup specifically gives out an Apple-branded product at a user meetup as part of an incentive to create a crowd-sourcing platform, etc., despite the fact it could find an off-brand alternative for 30% less. Yet, unlike in the field of advertising, where the selection of media brands is given so much consideration there are vast databases on media platform demographics, the issue of brand media is often driven by gut or hunch even though it usually involves an organization’s most important stakeholders. See “The Untapped Power of Brand Media.”

An underlying principle for Brand media is the importance of fun as a means of engaging people; multiple research studies indicate that both fun and a sense of community are critical to creating a culture of sustainable engagement. Other principles that can be addressed through Brand Media are capability, emotion, support, and task value.

The role of Brand Personality. A key foundation on Brand Media theory is the concept of Brand Personality highlighted in “The Untapped Power of Brand Media.” Developed by Dr. Sharon Aaker, a Stanford University business professor, but supported by others as an underlying element to successful brands, the concept of Brand Personality suggests that each brand tells a story that is either deliberate—the result of a CEO or founder-driven vision, or is accidental, the consequence of a lack of vision related to the importance of establishing a clear brand personality based on authentic values. Organizations obtain the best results from their use of gift and award programs when they carefully consider how they can select the right brands to most powerfully resonate with the audience with whom they wish to reinforce their own brand story.

Would anyone think of bringing a bunch of financial executives to a budget hotel off a highway in an industrial area for an executive retreat (except if to make a special point), or offering vintage wine as the safety award on a construction site right after a hard day in the hot sun unless the crew happened to be wine aficionados? Yet even though gifts and awards have the highest impact and cost-per-thousand of any engagement tactic, many if not most organizations assume that their hunches on program design and reward selection alone suffice. See: IRF’s 2019 Voice of the Market: The Use of Non-Cash Rewards and Recognition.

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The Applications for Brand Media

Organizations use brands in all sorts of internal, B2B, B2C, workplace and hospitality amenities, employee, and fund-raising applications, including:

Gifts for boards, guests and delegations, events and experiences, customers, distribution partners, donors and volunteers etc.
Hospitality, workplace amenities and perquisites. The brands you see in your lunchrooms, board rooms and even workplace areas should be purchased from the corporate channel to benefit from expertise, value, customization and personalization, and with a thought to which brands align with the values of your own organization.
Rewards or gifts for customers or for use in promotions or events.
Incentives and recognition for distribution partners, sales and non-sales employees, vendors, donors, and volunteers.
Prizes for sweepstakes and contests and related consumer promotions, or fund-raisers.
Equipment donated for sporting events, clean-up efforts, volunteer home-building or restoration projects, etc.
Cross-selling and added-value programs, especially in business-to business. For instance, a marketing agency might offer a discount on the services of a third-party analytics platform that will drive greater value or ROI.

Almost always, without much application of science or data, these brands and gifts are picked to appeal to the target audience and are marketed specifically to communicate their value as a form of appreciation. Given that the above tactics are used to motivate over 100 million households and over 150 million employees as of 2019, that’s a huge amount of exposure for which participating brands not only pay nothing but for which the are paid.

Why So Few People Have Heard of a $50 Billion Industry

Any CEO or CMO considering this new business would have to wonder how he or she had never heard of it before?

Despite the fact that one of the industry’s trade publications, Incentive, has been in continuous publication since 1901 (except for brief pauses during the two world wars), few business people know that a separate field exists currently still known by insiders as the premium and incentive business with estimated sales of $50 billion per year. Today, based on extensive research on the power of brands in rewards and recognition, the field is beginning to become known as Brand Media by those who agree the current branding is stale. This is because something is wrong with the industry’s current strategy: despite having one trade association known as the Incentive Marketing Association with about 500 company members, some representing the world’s best known brands; another known as the Society of Incentive and Travel Executives with as many if not more brand-name members in the travel field; a half dozen trade media platforms with a combined circulation of over 300,000, and multiple trade events, ask anyone in business outside of an industry event if they have ever heard of the business, and the percentage answering yes is almost zero. Unlike someone in advertising, meetings, medicine, trucking, etc. anyone in this field must explain the field to anyone who asks what they do.

Adding to the irony, almost everyone in management has received or given business gifts, enjoyed workplace amenities, redeemed points in loyalty programs, earned recognition for length of service or other accomplishments, participated in incentive trips, motivational events, or some kind of sales, quality productivity, recognition, or related points-program. How could a field so ubiquitous that touches so many people remain so below the radar screen after so many decades?

The answer is simple. Unlike with advertising, event marketing, corporate social responsibility, etc., companies almost never wish to publicize their gift and award programs. With the exception of contests and sweepstakes, event sponsorships, charitable promotions, or the occasional CEO who is proud of and wishes to publicize recognition given to employees, customers and other stakeholders, organizations want nothing to do with publicity either for fear that the program will raise eyebrows as a perceived bribe or unsavory gift or because they do not want competitors to know the strategies they consider most successful at moving the needle. As a result, almost no coverage exists on the field in the general business media except when there is a scandal; almost no education institutions even mention the field in business education, despite the fact that a reasonable estimate of all the money spent on non-cash gifts, awards, travel and amenities easily tops $50 billion, far bigger than many industries that get far more coverage.

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How Do You Know if Your Brand Is Good Enough?

What is unique about the Brand Media business is that it enables a brand to quantify to some extent at least the relative value of its brand equity. Companies like S’well, Yeti, Northface, Bulova, and many others can put a dollar value on their brand equity by the amount of incremental sales they are generating in the corporate market based on their brand equity, without even mentioning the free marketing and endorsement being provided to their brand. Unlike promotional products, which carry no other brand name but that of the company giving the item, Brand Media products and services carry the name of a brand specifically for the purpose of enhancing the perceived value and telling a story. The more a company sells into this market, the more it says about the actual dollar value of the organization’s brand equity.

So what does your brand need to succeed in this market and find out at least one potential value source in your brand?

1. Is your brand valuable to someone? Would an organization have a need to or interest in offering your product or service as a gift, award, experience, as added value—has anyone every asked about using your product or service in some way to enhance their own? This does not mean your product or service has to be consumer oriented. For instance, a contractor might well enjoy a new high-quality tool as part of an engagement program; a medical office a refrigerator for vaccines; a buy-one get one-free or discounted offer combining a parking space and free oil change. A plumbing supply company could offer a value-added promotion related to solving a practical learning or diagnostics challenge facing plumbers. Brand Media is a way of thinking that personifies your own company’s brands and taps its brand equity and value to help other organizations enhance the value of their brands and achieve their goals.

2. Could this channel represent at least 5% to 10% of your sales? That’s the minimum most but the largest consumer and travel companies do in this business as a percentage of their sales. Again, the first test is to see if your sales or marketing team has ever received any such questions and the second to see if any of your competitors or similar types of companies are active in this space by reviewing the companies you’ll find in the Resources section (if your company is in consumer products, gift cards and travel). Otherwise, look what types of cross-marketing programs you’re seeing in your trade or community.

3. Does your brand add value and have a good reputation in your market or community? Does your product or service add value or enrich lives or enable business? If a company were to get it for free, would they value it? In other words, yours does not have to be a consumer product, gift card or travel experience to have a role in this market. Yours does not have to be a nationally known brand to succeed in this business. A small chain of car wash companies could leverage a co-marketing program with auto parts stores. In fact, many under the radar screen brands can use this industry to catapult to national attention that can bring its consumer business along with it by being featured in a widely marketed national or regional offer.

4. Do you have someone on your team who can oversee the business plan development and launch? Even if your company outsources the management of this channel to a third-party, as many do, you will need an inhouse sales manager to oversee that person or organization and serve as a liaison with the firms to which you outsource the various aspects of the business.

What Is the Upside

For many consumer, gift card, and travel destinations appealing to the corporate market, the Brand Media market is a significant part of sales, profits, and also is a means offsetting retail seasonality, reducing reliance on retail and e-commerce, and opening up a nonconflicting sales channel that provides free marketing, paid product trail, incremental sales, and positive word of mouth.

What Are the Risks

Because the cost of testing this market is so low in both people or financial resources, the biggest risk for any organization is being sold in to spending too much to test the marketing or having their brand associated with inappropriate brands for the wrong purposes; sold through undesirable retail or other channels; or exported without authorization, etc. Like in any other field that has high value, Brand Media programs can be perceived as bribes or worse and need to follow the highest principles of transparency and codes of conduct, such as in the financial services, insurance, and health care fields, for example. One of the primary missions of the Brand Media Coalition is to carefully recruit and educate marketing specialists who value these rules.

Another risk is potential disruption to your main business. The corporate market has different reasons for purchasing than consumers; different demands and timing and cost considerations, and often seeks exceptions to the rule in terms of how it would like the program customized. For some companies, the trade-offs are simply too much, and even when that is not the case, the specific nature of this business explains why most brands usually work closely with master fulfillment partners to help with distribution in this field.

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Brand Media Industry Players

Going back as it does well over a century, the industry has an infrastructure of players to which almost all aspects of a Brand Media division business can be outsourced, with some cautionary notes covered in Steps to Success. The key players and resources for finding the right solution for your company are:

Brand corporate special markets departments. In the past, almost all brands had active inhouse “special markets” departments to handle the corporate business, who sold through incentive representatives, and many still do have these departments and use incentive “reps.” If one seeks to do business with a specific brand, go to the Brand Media Guide or, if it is not yet part of the Coalition, to its consumer web site and check to see either in its navigation tabs and subnavigation, or the web site’s footer, if there is a link to Corporate Sales. Here’s an example of the link to be found for Canon special markets. After the Great Recession of 2008, many brands outsourced this business to companies now known as “master fulfillment companies;” that is, wholesalers or stocking distributors with the ability to maintain inventories of brands and drop- or bulk-ship items redeemed now mostly through online gift, incentive, recognition, loyalty, or fund-raising catalogs. Most brands sell directly through multiple master fulfillment companies; a few, such as Bose, have outsourced corporate sales to a specific master fulfillment companies. This does not mean that one must purchase the product from that master fulfillment company, as others may stock the product as well and could have it available at competitive prices or with support services at the time needed that another fulfillment company cannot provide at the required moment.

Retailers and gift cards. Much of the above applies to retail companies active in the market. For instance, 1-800Flowers.com has a link to corporate gift sales on the header of the site and it employs an inhouse corporate sales team of multiple people, some of them certified with the Certified Engagement Practitioner designation. Crutchfield has a separate corporate sales division for its products. Most retailers active in the market focus on selling their gift cards and belong to the Incentive Marketing Association.

Master fulfillment companies. These wholesalers specializing in the corporate market, of which there are no more than several dozen in the U.S., not only stock many of the leading brands and in some cases gift cards for appropriate corporate use, but to varying degrees offer:

Complete program support, design, technology and implementation in addition to rewards fulfillment. This level of support is offered by only a few of these companies.
Complete support with merchandise and/or gift card selection, fulfillment, customization and personalization; in some cases, event experience programs in which brands set up boutiques at events from which recipients select their rewards or gifts in custom-fitting purchasing experiences. Another attention-getting promotion is a warehouse run-through, which some of these companies can organize, in which participants are given a shopping cart and a set period of time to select their prizes as seen on some television game shows.
Complete online (and/or print) catalog creation and curation, procurement and logistics management.
Sophisticated analytics that provide for more intelligent selection of brands, communications and other program elements based on actual behavioral data generated from the platform. Only a few offer this level of service.

Click here for the master fulfillment companies in the Brand Media Coalition, the early pioneers and industry leaders bringing a powerful new tool to the market. To find a complete list of all active companies, click on Resources. Most belong to the Incentive Marketing Association and some to the Promotional Products Association or Advertising Specialty Institute.

Incentive, recognition, and loyalty companies. This is the general designation for solution providers that help companies create sales and non-sales incentive, customer loyalty, and employee recognition programs. Most have evolved from providers of non-cash awards to providers of technology, program design and implementation services, and the largest of them, with sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars in award and services sales, support the gift, awards, and motivational event needs of the world's largest organizations. A complete list is available the EEA's Enterprise Engagement Solution Provider Directory.

Incentive travel. Gone are the days when many planners of travel for motivational events, incentives, gifting or fundraising didn’t know the distinction between a travel agent and a motivational event planner, but the appreciation for the creative talents required to craft a masterful group or individual travel experience remains low, based on most surveys of end-users. Even though these trips, due to their cost, involve almost always an organization’s most important customers, distribution partners, or employees, companies frequently cut corners without seriously addressing the potential impact on engagement. It’s one thing to make valuable customers or employees wait on hold to get service for 10 minutes; it’s another to subject them to a terrible or inferior travel experience, let alone overlook this unique opportunity to forge a long-lasting emotional bond by making the experience an unforgettable reinforcement of your brand values and relationships.

Almost every leading brand and venue active in the corporate market has a corporate meetings and incentive market. Just check their web sites for a link to group sales. Many specialized in the travel market belong to the Society of Incentive Travel Executives, which has a learning and certification program for the business but does not make its directory available for free to nonmembers.

Incentive Representatives: These consist of regional manufacturers representatives who usually represent about 30 or more brands in a given region. See Resources for a directory. There are only about 100 or so such companies in the U.S., and almost all belong to the Incentive Manufacturers Representatives Association, which provides education and networking programs and promotes ethical standards.

Motivational event planners: A subset of the meeting planning and event businesses are companies and planners who usually belong to the Society of Incentive & Travel Executives and who are specifically committed to helping organizations maximize the impact of group or individual incentive travel or motivational event experiences for any audience. There are at most several hundred motivational event planning specialist companies in the U.S. Some of these companies are listed in the EEA's Enterprise Engagement Solution Provider Directory.

Promotional products distributors: A growing number of promotional products distributors, best known for selling unbranded merchandise that companies imprint with their own brands, now offer brands as well. Start with working with distributors who have become Brand Media Specialists but certainly, since there are still so few, work with those who belong to either the Promotional Products Association International or Advertising Specialty Institute. While there are tens of thousands of distributors, only a few until recently have focused on offering brands. That number is expected to grow rapidly because of the new focus on using brands as a media. [return to top]

Steps to Success

While the resources required to succeed in Brand Media are minimal, time is money, so this process includes a careful evaluation.

Essentially, there are two types of opportunities for profiting from your Brand as a media, depending on the type of product or service:

Consumer-oriented gifts, awards, merchandise, gift cards and experiences used for people, employees, distribution partners, customers, vendors, communities, charities, amenities, etc.
Business-oriented products or services used for organizations in B2B.

This e-book focuses mostly on the use of consumer-oriented gifts, awards, and experiences for people, but many of the same principles apply to business-oriented products and services used for workplace and hospitality amenities. For instance, a trucking company would be unlikely set up a high-end male cosmetic boutique at a truck stop, unless that industry is undergoing demographic changes this author is unaware of but might in fact set up boutique showing amenities for the trucker’s cab or sleeping quarters. Any B2B company can create a "gift" card for its service that could be of value to a business.

How much will it cost? Fewer new markets than Brand Media have a lower cost of entry. The distribution channel is relatively small and easy to reach, with the biggest mistake being that companies overspend. Here are the steps to success.

1. Evaluation

A. Can this business represent at least 5% to 10% of your sales? Would the marketing exposure used to promote these programs be of value to your brand? Could these sales lead to additional sales or new customers? You can answer these questions based in part on whether anyone else in your industry is active in the field or uses these tactics in their marketing? You can look back at your organization’s own history and see if companies have come to you with these requests. Most companies get into Brand Media because a business customer came to them with a need or desire.

B. Do you have a sales manager with the time and acumen to learn the business and develop the right test plan for your organization? It does not have to be a full-time job if the business is largely outsourced, but it does at first a full-time effort if you wish to move quickly. Has perhaps someone in your organization heard of this field or had some involvement, starting with the information source or person who brought this field to your attention, if not a customer. This sales manager should have an entrepreneurial nature and be a quick learner, preferably with business-to-business experience. People with a retail focus will invariably fail in this field, whose distribution and buying process vary significantly from retail.

C. How much support does your organization need in terms of developing and implementing the plan? Do you have the inhouse expertise to create the “product” that leverages your brand, develop the appropriate distribution partners equipped with the right sales and marketing materials, training and support, and a sales and marketing plan, even if that means outsourcing much of it? Have you considered the process for handling and fulfilling sales and providing support, or any technology such as APIs that might be involved with connecting your inventory to online catalogs?

2. Develop a Business Plan

Like any other new business, your effort requires a business plan that addresses the following issues:

1. The goal and overview of strategies, tactics, timeline, roles and responsibilities and ROI.

2. The offering—what specifically will you be bringing to the market and how.

3. Implementation—who is going to develop the plan, make sure everything gets done on budget; crystallize the message and unique selling proposition; managing requests from your distribution channel?

3. Distribution

The lack of marketing agencies that specialize in this field leads brands invariably to master fulfillment companies, the vital partner for any consumer product or gift-card company seeking to enter the corporate marketplace. Because of lack of internal resources and time, a few brands and gift cards choose to name one single master fulfillment partner to handle the business plan, distribution, and launch, given that there are about a half-dozen or so that have that full-service capability. The risk with this strategy, and which should only be used when internal resources are lacking and speed is paramount--and then only usually for a pre-determined period--is similar to the home seller's risk of giving a real-estate broker an exclusive with one additional challenge: there will always be a number of other master fulfillment companies who will do whatever they can to avoid using your brand if you have assigned it exclusively to one of its keenest competitors. Until that mentality breaks down, exclusive agreements should be avoided except in either temporary cases or in which the business simply isn’t large enough as a percentage of your business to worry about such risks.

4. Marketing and Sales

For many consumer products and travel companies, the first place to start is with their own customers. The people who value your product or service are the first to think it might have value to others. Look at the web sites of many consumer products and travel companies and you’ll now find navigation for corporate gifts and meetings on travel sites. That said, most brands could do far more to engage and inform their own customers. Almost all brands that get into the business do so because customers come to them first, but then they still make it hard for business customers to find them, often because of the fear of turning a full-price customer into a discount. However, overlooked in this calculation is that this organizational customer is usually buying in bulk to promote your brand as a desirable gift or award, a paid product placement by any definition, except that it’s your organization that gets paid. Make it easy for organizations to find your services, give them ideas on how to use your products and services for organizational engagement, perquisites or amenities, etc., and make it clear what types of organizations you like to do business with, and what types you cannot have your brand associated with, for that matter.

Beyond that, the cost of marketing corporate sales directly to the potentially millions of companies that at any time could use your brand is rarely profitable, unless carefully woven into the consumer message, because gift-buying is often ad hoc and periodic, rather than planned and strategic, and the decision-maker could be almost anyone, from a CMO to an intern asked to do the shopping and bring ideas to the CEO. So, the next best alternative is to focus on the very easy to identify and target community of promotional products distributors, master fulfillment companies, and incentive reps that support them and properly engage and sell them to bring your brand to market.

To become known in the “trade” is remarkably easy because:

Distributors are easily reached through low-cost media and trade shows offered by the Advertising Specialty Institute and Promotional Products Association International: There are about 40,000 distributors that do at least six-figures in volume, and some do in the seven figures annually, although much of this still in non-branded products.
There are no more than about three dozen master fulfillment companies and far fewer specializing in gift cards, most easily found in the Brand Media Coalition or the member directory of the Incentive Marketing Association.
There are only about 30 loyalty and marketing companies, several dozen recognition companies, and perhaps about 150 incentive companies in the U.S., probably the largest market in the world for these services, all of which are easily identified and reached. Most can be found in EEA's Enterprise Engagement Solution Provider Directory.

What is required most of all is continuity of communication by providing ideas, useful information, case studies, and statistics to help resellers educate their clients on the story-telling and motivational power of your brand. Most brands make the big mistake of selling products and pricing when they should be telling stories and selling ideas that can help organizations achieve their goals with key audiences.

Where to Start

The Brand Media Coalition provides complete support services for any brand entering the firm, including education on the field, a Brand Media Profile in the coalitions Brand Media Guide, business plan development, selection of master fulfillment partners, implementation of business plans. In addition, we can assist with development of all necessary sales and marketing tools and fully integrated business development strategy to reach all facts of the marketplace. For information, contact Bruce Bolger, Bolger@TheEEA.org; 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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Resources

This article is published by the Brand Media Coalition at BrandMediaCoalition.com, a growing alliance of leading brands, gift cards, and master fulfillment companies dedicated to using research and effective practices to help brands benefit from the use of other brands to tell their own stories and achieve better results from their stakeholder engagement strategies and practices.

Gift and Reward Programs

The Art and Science of Corporate Gifting, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance 2019. This report provides an up-to-date report on all facets of gifting. A companion article to The Art and Science of Engaging Rewards, published in 2017 by the Enterprise Engagement Alliance.

Incentive Program Design

The Incentive Marketing Association’s curriculum and certification program is the best education and only certification for program design. Click here for more information. Most of the major players in the industry belong to this organization, including brands, gift cards, and master fulfillment companies, as well as some incentive and recognition companies.

Recognition Programs

Most of the major players in this belong to this organization.

Loyalty Programs

Most of the major suppliers below to these two organization:

The Loyalty Academy
The Wise Marketer.

BrandMediaCoalition.com, a growing alliance of leading brands, gift cards, and master fulfillment companies active in the market now publishes a Brand Media Guide. This is the only guide specifically designed to tell the stories of the leading brands active in the market to facilitate more strategic brand selection for gift and incentive programs.

Directory of Brands, Gift Cards, Master Fulfillment Companies, and Some Incentive and Recognition Companies:

Incentive Marketing Association, the industry’s only trade association for brands, master fulfillment companies, and gift cards, features a directory of all members. Click here.

Incentive Recognition, Loyalty Companies. The 2019 Enterprise Engagement Solution Provider Directory that features almost all such companies active in the U.S. of any size.

Trade Media

Incentive at Incentivemag.com, the industry’s oldest publication, now available mostly online, and has a particular focus on incentive travel and destinations, as well as incentive program design, industry research, and profiles of and roundtables with leading suppliers.

Premium Incentive Products at PIPmag.com, founded in 2007, the leading print publication in the field whose advertisers are the most active in the business and with a circulation of 40,000. PIP is a member of the Brand Media Coalition.

RRN at RewardsRecognition.com, founded as the first print and online industry trade magazine in 1996 and in continuous publication since then and the first in the first trade media platform to go online to deliver to the trade via their smart phones when they need it critical industry news, how-to information, research, insights, and interviews. RRN’s parent organization, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance, founded the Brand Media Coalition

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Master the Principles of Enterprise Engagement to Achieve Organizational Goals and Enhance Your Career

Profit from a new strategic and systematic approach to engagement to enhance your organization’s brand equity; increase sales, productivity, quality, innovation, and safety, and reduce risks.
Get trained to become a Chief Engagement Officer for your organization.
Achieve ISO 10018 Quality People Management Certification to demonstrate your organization’s strategic commitment to people to your customers, employees, distribution partners, vendors, communities, investors, and regulators.
Learn how to create Sustainability or Integrated Reports for Your Organization or Clients.
Get up-to-speed on ISO human resources standards and guidelines to enhance HR performance.

Live Education: Enterprise Engagement in Action. Take advantage of scheduled monthly live webinar preparation courses for the Certified Engagement Practitioner designation consisting of three one-hour classes and of quarterly Advanced Engagement Practitioner courses consisting of three one-hour webinar classes. The AEP course is for individuals or teams seeking preparation ISO 10018 professional certification status. ICEE periodically runs regional one-day workshops on ISO 10018 Quality People Management principles and certification.

Resources: The Brand Media Coalition, the only guide to the story-telling power of brands and where to source them for business, event, promotional gifting, and rewards and recognition. 2019 Enterprise Engagement Solution Provider Directory. The only directory of engagement solution providers covering all types of agencies and tactics as well as insights on how to select them.

In Print:

Enterprise Engagement for CEOs: The Little Blue Book for People-Centric Capitalists

Written specifically to provide CEOs and their leadership teams a concise overview of the framework, economics, and implementation process of a CEO-led strategic and systematic approach to achieving success through people. (123 pages, $15.99)

Online:
•  10-minute short course: click here for a 10-minute introduction to Enterprise
•  Engagement and ISO standards on Coggno.com.
•  5-minute Audiopedia summary of the Enterprise Engagement field.

Services:
•  The International Center for Enterprise Engagement at TheICEE.org, offering: ISO 10018 certification for employers, solution providers, and Enterprise Engagement technology platforms; Human Resources and Human Capital audits for organizations seeking to benchmark their practices and related Advisory services for the hospitality field.
•  The Engagement Agency at EngagementAgency.net, offering: complete support services for employers, solution providers, and technology firms seeking to profit from formal engagement practices for themselves or their clients, including Brand and Capability audits for solution providers to make sure their products and services are up to date.
•  C-Suite Advisory Service—Education of boards, investors, and C-suite executives on the economics, framework, and implementation processes of Enterprise Engagement.
•  Speakers Bureau—Select the right speaker on any aspect of engagement for your next event.
•  Mergers and Acquisitions. The Engagement Agency’s Mergers and Acquisition group is aware of multiple companies seeking to purchase firms in the engagement field. Contact Michael Mazer in confidence if your company is potentially for sale at 303-320-3777.

For more information, contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheEEA.org, 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap, 5th Edition

Edition 5 Now Available on Amazon.com and on BarnesandNoble.com.

The only practical guidebook and desk reference for executives and front-line management seeking to apply a strategic and systematic approach to achieving organizational objectives and improving shareholder value and share-price performance in public and privately held organizations, government, and not-for-profits. This book offers a formal framework for the application of engagement principles across the enterprise and details the numerous tactics and applications of engagement in all segments of business and the economy. Enterprise Engagement differs from the traditional approach to employee and customer engagement in that it aligns engagement strategies and tactics across the organization to ensure efficiency and measurable success.Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap is designed for the senior leaders in charge of strategic and tactical engagement plan development and for the front-line managers involved with implementation. It provides a desk reference to all the engagement strategies and tactics and how to better align them to achieve strategic or tactical goals. It provides a guide to developing ISO Annex SL and ISO 1001- compliant strategies and for auditing engagement processes, as well as information on engagement careers and applications for engagement in government and not-for profits.

Bruce Bolger, Allan Schweyer & Richard Kern . 310 pp. Cost: $36

Creating the Best Workplaces: Insights from Global Employee Engagement Influencers

The Employee Engagement Awards recently published its first eBook, Creating the Best Workplaces: Insights from Global Employee Engagement Influencers. It contains Top Tips identified by “EE Influencers,” as well as the biggest pitfalls that companies should avoid when executing their engagement strategy, the important role that employee engagement plays in customer engagement, the reasons why employees fail to buy into employee engagement, and much more. A collection of interviews conducted over the past two years with award winners, judges, EE experts, and best-selling authors, Creating the Best Workplaces highlights the best practices of companies like British Airways, Ford, Royal Bank of Scotland, Rolls Royce and many more. Download a free copy here.

Leaders of Marketing Movement Advocate Need to Create an 'Inbound Organization'

In their new book, “Inbound Organization,” authors Todd Hockenberry and Dan Tyre, among the earliest leaders in the Inbound and Content Marketing movement, focus on the importance of engaging the entire organization, principles that will resonate with ESM readers and Enterprise Engagement Alliance members.

The concept of Inbound Marketing first became popular in 2006, when Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah founded Hubspot, which has grown into one of the world’s leading inbound and content marketing platforms. According to Wikipedia, “Inbound marketing provides information, an improved customer experience and builds trust by offering potential customers information they value via company-sponsored newsletters, blogs and entries on social platforms.” The concept, reportedly based on the notion of “permission marketing” developed in the 1990s by consultant Seth Godin, is focused on enabling marketers “to earn their way into a customer’s awareness rather than invading their awareness through paid advertising.” To learn more about Inbound Marketing, go to Academy.hubspot.com for an online learning and certification program.

We recently contacted the authors of Inbound Organization, Todd Hockenberry and Dan Tyre, who assert that to succeed at Inbound Marketing, a company has to have an “Inbound Culture.”

ESM: What would you say are the key takeaways from the book—what message did you feel was essential to get across and to whom?

Hockenberry and Tyre: The world has changed and lots of business owners have missed it. Everyone wants to grow, but no one wants to change. We want to make sure everyone understands the high stakes involved in optimizing your company to take advantage of the inbound revolution. Inbound Organization is for anyone struggling to make sense of the new buyer behavior and needs to figure out how to build a team capable of delivering the experience those buyers demand. Business owners with large and small companies, entrepreneurs, startups, business leaders, managers, HubSpot partner agencies, marketing teams, salespeople…anyone with a need to grow today and into the future is the audience for our book.

The key takeaways are that growing today and in the future will start with a mindset change, one where leaders must put their customers and their employees first and help them. Leaders must create a mission and vision, build a culture that is reflective of the goals and aspirations of both employees and customers, and then give them an operating system within which to do their best work. Inbound is a thing not because someone came up with a methodology, but because buyers changed the way they want to learn, research and find solutions to problems, which in turn changed the way people buy and sell. Inbound marketing was a reaction to the changing buyer and digital connectivity.

Inbound is at its heart two things: being helpful first and attracting versus interrupting. Everything else flows from those two principles. Our book is about how leaders take these core beliefs and drive them through the entire organization, so businesses are built for and solve for the customer at every step along the buying journey. It is now as much about who you are as it is what you sell that determines who grows and who stagnates. And buyers today are “inbound” so you must be inbound if you want to reach them.

ESM: What was the “Aha”moment when you realized companies were missing the connection between the internal and external audiences?

Hockenberry and Tyre: We wrote the book because Dan and I both understood that Inbound was much more than a marketing methodology and had become a set of beliefs and a mindset required for businesses to grow with modern buyers. Dan and I were both speaking to a group of tool-and-die manufacturers at a trade show in Southern California in late 2016. We were having coffee and catching up, and Dan asked me what I was working on. I told him that I was working with business leaders to take the beliefs around Inbound to the entire organization and that just doing Inbound Marketing was no longer enough to grow.

He jumped up and excitedly said “I’m doing a presentation called The Inbound Organization and I’m talking about the same things!” So that was the “Aha “moment when we knew were thinking about the same thing and the moment we decided to write the book telling that story. We both saw a need to help companies understand the new competitive landscape and embrace the Inbound philosophy quickly for their own benefit. After our presentations, people would say “OK, we want to become an Inbound organization, what happens next? That’s why we wrote the book—to help provide the next step.

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ESM: What do you think is necessary for companies to implement your concept of the Inbound Organization?

Hockenberry and Tyre: The first step is to understand that the fundamental shift to Inbound has occurred and that organizations need to change to adapt to it. The same old playbooks and processes will not work. The next step becomes building a culture and an operating system that drives the ideas and beliefs of Inbound to everyone in the organization. These beliefs include:

• Helping first

• Solving for the customers

• Transparency

• Strategies based on a target persona

• Engagement all along the buyer journey

• Using content in a strategic way

• Aligning everyone in the organization behind the mission

• Using data to make decisions about marketing and sales

But it all starts with the mindset of the leadership team. You can’t fake it. You must lean into helping with your marketing team, sales team, customer service team. That seems obvious, but also your operations team, legal team, your human resources team. It really is the entire company.

ESM: Who do you think is the final decision maker for this? Who manages this? HR, Marketing, the CEO?

Hockenberry and Tyre: I think that’s an old-school way of thinking about Inbound. There’s no final decision maker. Inbound is a way of doing business, a way of looking at customers and employees and all partners and stakeholders. Leaders must start the process, but every person in every department is responsible, and in fact accountable, to act in an Inbound way and deliver the experience that buyers, employees and partners need and want. It’s also more monitored than command-and-control managed. Everyone must know what the mission, strategy, plays and goals are and be accountable to living up to them.

We’re not saying there’s no management, but the culture and operating system, if built correctly, keep everyone on track and living up to inbound beliefs. Leaders have been saying “customers first” for decades. We are now at the point where we can back it up with data, focus and instant results. For us, it’s the founders, board of directors, senior management team and division heads that are responsible for the vision and execution of the inbound philosophy.

ESM: How much do you think marketers understand about how to use content to identify people in a researching or shopping mode and to build trust—i.e., helping versus selling? In other words, where are marketers in this shift toward an Inbound approach on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being most advanced?

Hockenberry and Tyre: Marketers are all over the map. It depends on the industry and even, to a degree, on location. Many B2C (business-to-consumer) marketers are well along the process of using content in a helpful and productive way, whereas B2B (business-to-business) tends to be much farther behind, though there are certainly exceptions. The test is to look at the brands you engage with and ask the simple question:Is this content/ad/marketing helpful to me and does it provide what I need/want/expect at this moment, or is it self-serving and focused on the seller?

We would grade marketers an overall 8 of 10, but the last mile is the most critical and hardest. We’re getting to the point where every individual should have a personalized interaction based on multiple factors that give them exactly what they want and need, in their preferred format and in the manner that they prefer to absorb it—think video vs. bullet points, story versus return-on-investment data. Machine learning will accelerate this trend. In 2019, if a website doesn’t know you by name the first time you visit it, you’ll scrunch up your nose like it is broken and think “How come this website doesn’t know who I am?”

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ESM: Do you think that the average person in marketing and sales is receiving the necessary training on how to inform and help rather than sell?

Hockenberry and Tyre: No. Again, ask this question of the salespeople you interact with on a daily basis: Are they helping, or are they pitching/selling/closing?

ESM: Being an agency yourself, how do you think this big shift toward informing, helping and building trust rather than selling and promoting will affect the agency business? Do you think it’s possible that with the advent of the Inbound Organization that the traditional agency model will collapse upon itself due to all the waste of “spray and pray.”

Hockenberry and Tyre: Agencies that don’t deliver results and ROI will go away regardless of their approach. I live in the B2B world, and the majority of companies don’t have the internal expertise and experience to deliver great content and share it in a productive way, so they often need outside help to make Inbound happen. I think that will always be the case—technology and buyers will change faster than many B2B companies will be able to react.

Great agencies will understand how to help their clients become more Inbound so the client can then start to do Inbound. Agencies that coach, teach and guide their clients to change their culture and beliefs will be the ones that see the most success. The ones that follow a script or menu approach to services will do a lot of Inbound but lag in terms of results. Marketing agencies are one-dimensional and set up for the way companies did business 20 years ago. “Growth” agencies support both marketing and sales, and they help you grow. Almost everyone wants to grow.

ESM: Do you believe that creating a platform to help organizations become what we call Inbound 360 to be a next frontier for Hubspot, or is this more a focus for Hubspot agencies?

Hockenberry and Tyre: It should be a focus for everyone. If you don’t have a mission, vision, plan and target to execute these days, you’re behind the curve. This is really important. When you’re buying any product, from a phone or a car to a house, copier or clothes, do you want someone to know you, help you and assist you, or do you want someone to push the same agenda all the time? If you’re not practicing Inbound, you could be playing catch up.

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ESM: Anything else you wish to tell us about the future of Inbound and Content Marketing and the connection to engagement across the enterprise?

Hockenberry and Tyre: We’re not going back to the days when interruptive marketing and product-focused selling were effective. Helping will be the new table stakes, personalizing interactions and relationships will be the expectation, and organizations lined up with the values and beliefs of their buyers will be the winners.

About the Authors:

Dan Tyre is Sales Director for Hubspot, the leader of the Inbound movement, offering a complete technology and solution platform for agencies that bring content marketing solutions to clients. Tyre joined HubSpot as a member of the original team in May of 2007, and has led the recruiting, training and growth of HubSpot’s sales team ever since.

Todd Hockenberry is Founder of Top Line Results, a nine-year-old Inbound agency focused on delivering growth strategies and tools to technology and capital equipment companies through more effective sales and marketing processes based on the needs of today’s buyers.

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Master the Principles of Enterprise Engagement and ISO 9001 and ISO 10018 Quality People Management and 9 New Human Resources Standards

Discover a new internationally sanctioned approach to create new wealthyou’re your organization by achieving greater return-on-investment on your organization’s budgets for culture, leadership, communications, training, rewards & recognition and more.

Live: Enterprise Engagement in Action: How to Apply ISO Annex SL and ISO 10018 Standards and Practices to Any Business.

Date, Location, and Fees: Wed. Oct. 3, 3 pm-5 pm, and Thu. Oct. 4, 9 am-3 pm, at the University of Texas Arlington, 20 minutes from Dallas Fort Worth Airport.

A crash course on how to apply Enterprise Engagement to everyday organizational goals and to profit from new ISO Annex SL and ISO 10018 standards and certification. Click here for more information and to register.

In Print: Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap 4th Edition, How to Achieve Organizational Results Through People and Quality for ISO 10018 Certification.

The first and most comprehensive book on Enterprise Engagement and the new ISO 9001 and ISO 10018 quality people management standards.

Online: The Enterprise Engagement Academy at EEA.tmlu.org, providing the only formal training on Enterprise Engagement and the new ISO 9001 and ISO 10018 quality people management standards. Provides preparation for professionals to support organizations seeking ISO 10018 employer or solution provider certification, as well as elective courses on Trade Show Engagement, Rewards and Recognition, Government, and other topics.

Plus: 10-minute short course: click here for a 10-minute introduction to Enterprise Engagement and ISO standards on Coggno.com.

Services: The International Center for Enterprise Engagement at TheICEE.org, offering: ISO 10018 certification for employers, solution providers, and Enterprise Engagement technology platforms; Human Resources and Human Capital audits for organizations seeking to benchmark their practices and related Advisory services for the hospitality field.

The Engagement Agency at EngagementAgency.net, offering: complete support services for employers, solution providers, and technology firms seeking to profit from formal engagement practices for themselves or their clients, including Brand and Capability audits for solution providers to make sure their products and services are up to date.

Enterprise Engagement Benchmark Tools: The Enterprise Engagement Alliance offers three tools to help organizations profit from Engagement. Click here to access the tools.

• ROI of Engagement Calculator. Use this tool to determine the potential return-on-investment of an engagement strategy.

• EE Benchmark Indicator. Confidentially benchmark your organization’s Enterprise Engagement practices against organizations and best practices.

• Compare Your Company’s Level of Engagement. Quickly compare your organization’s level of engagement to those of others based on the same criteria as the EEA’s Engaged Company Stock Index.

• Gauge Your Personal Level of Engagement. This survey, donated by Horsepower, enables individuals to gauge their own personal levels of engagement.

For more information, contact Bruce Bolger at Bolger@TheEEA.org, 914-591-7600, ext. 230.

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The Loyalty Leap: Turning Customer Information into Customer Intimacy

With over 20 years of experience running large loyalty programs, Bryan Pearson, President of LoyaltyOne, is a good person to query about the state of the industry. Pearson is the author of the best-selling book, The Loyalty Leap: Turning Customer Information into Customer Intimacy, as well as The Loyalty Leap for B2B. He explains that there are three essential elements involved with establishing loyalty: rewards, recognition and relevance. Relevance, notes Pearson, means providing customers useful information and special experiences based on their interests and preferences – in many cases demonstrated through interactions with loyalty programs, but also through customer relationship management data. “A lot of the folks in this space stop short of creating the full value that’s available to them by connecting the data they get from their loyalty programs and other communications filtered through the customer’s perspective and what specifically is valued in the relationship,” he explains. Addressing this overlooked element is the basis of his concept of what constitutes the “Capital L” in Loyalty. Available from Amazon

Brian Pearson . 272 pages. Hardcover. Cost: $17.69

Disrupting Digital Business

Anyone who understands the principles of Enterprise Engagement will enjoy "Disrupting Digital Business" by R. Ray Wang, published by Harvard Business Review Press. Wang, a veteran technology analyst running two of his own consulting firms (currently Constellation Research, and before that Altimeter) and with past positions at Forrester, Oracle, Ernst & Young and Deloitte, believes that, as stated in the subtitle of the book, the key to success is to “create an authentic experience in the peer-to-peer economy.” Many of the chapters overlay the basic framework of what we call Enterprise Engagement. This the perfect book to send to technology leaders seeking to understand the role of engagement in organizational success and the critical role of technology. “When you boil everything down, you can throw out the word ‘digital’ because it is all about relationships with people,” he says. “Companies that don’t make this transformation will go away. We are already seeing increasing gaps in various markets between the market leaders and the No. 2s and No. 3s. What will be the future for Samsung in the handheld marketplace if it continues to lose ground to Apple around the world? They’re getting squeezed at the low end of the market and at the top.” Available from Amazon.

R. Ray Wang . 208 pages. Hardcover. Cost: $17.16

Strategic Internal Communication: How to Build Employee Engagement and Performance

A 2012 State of the Sector survey compiled by Gatehouse, in conjunction with the Institute of Internal Communication, reveals that improving leadership communication has emerged as a top priority, with 60% of respondents naming it as their main focus over the next 12 months. While decisions made by management may be perfectly rational, poor communication can leave employees confused, worried or disinterested. This can directly impact the levels of engagement and performance across an organization. Strategic Internal Communication offers a holistic approach to building engagement, performance and cultural integration. It looks at the relation between the traditional silos of internal organizational communication, HR and employee engagement and demonstrates how communication is a key factor in breaking down barriers. Using the Dialogue Box approach, an efficient framework for assessing the needs and impact of internal communications, it allows managers and leaders to understand the emotions of their company and how this links to the ways employees interpret events and information. Available from Amazon.

David Cowan. 186 pages. Paperback. Cost: $37.95

MAGIC: Five Keys to Unlock the Power of Employee Engagement

Employees and leaders intuitively know that when we find a place where we can throw our hearts, spirits, minds, and hands into our work, we are happier, healthier, and produce better results. Yet, most struggle to understand exactly why we engage in some environments, and don't in others. Magic introduces the five MAGIC keys of employee engagement--Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact, and Connection--and shows how leaders can help employees achieve higher levels of engagement, as well as how employees can be more successful by taking ownership for their own MAGIC. Based on over 14 million employee survey responses across 70 countries--the most extensive employee engagement survey database of its kind--Magic combines principles of psychology and motivation with solid business concepts. Written by internationally recognized experts in leadership and employee engagement, Dr. Tracy Maylett and Dr. Paul Warner, Magic provides actionable advice that will reduce employee attrition, encourage initiative, drive growth and profit, and increase personal engagement in one's work. Available from Amazon.

Tracy Maylett and Paul Warner. 256 pages. Cost: $20.31

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