There are certain brands that fascinate me and I can never learn enough about them. Google is one of those brands. I recently finished Douglas Edwards’ book “I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59” and I can’t stop talking about it. Just ask my coworkers – it’s been Google does this and Google did that for about three weeks now.

The book is an interesting look into the company as it was first starting up until it went public. I love how Edwards lets us in on key meetings that determined how the tiniest of details would be presented first through the search engine and then through AdWords, Google News, etc. As a believer that a true brand lies in the details, I could not get enough of these insights.

In addition, the book talks a lot about Google’s culture and showcases examples of how the company brought that culture to life in its TGIF meetings, office space and decision making. As with many successful brands, the strong culture is the foundation for the Google brand and its distinct voice.

As Google’s first dedicated brand marketer, Edwards helped to build and set standards for one of today’s most iconic brands. While this is only one employee’s perspective, it is definitely worth adding this book to your “To Read” list.

Have you read it yet? Let us know what you thought.

One of the keys to building a successful brand externally is to build your brand internally. Not only do your employees live and breathe the brand each day, but they are the ones communicating it to your current and future customers. So how do you develop a successful internal branding campaign? Here are a few tips. 

1. Provide easy to understand and easy to access tools. These tools could be as simple as a rack card at each employee’s desk or educational pages on your company’s intranet.
2. Engage team members from multiple departments. Ask department leaders to highlight employees who are enthusiastic and willing to carry the brand flag within the team. Then educate these brand ambassadors on the brand and how to talk to their coworkers about the value of the organization’s brand.  
3. Do it once, twice, three times and don’t stop. Internal branding is not something that can be done once and be considered successful. If it is just done once, employees may just see it as a campaign. Regularly communicating about the brand will help engrain it in your organization’s culture. Consider highlighting a different organization benefit or value each month, explaining its value and showing examples of how the brand is lived each day by employees.

When your employees believe it, your customers and future customers will notice. By tapping into your greatest brand implementation tool – your workforce – your organization will not only be singing from the same hymn book (pardon my Southern phrasing), but so will your customers.

It’s easy for you to start talking about the products or services your company offers, but how do you talk about your company itself? It’s not enough to promote one of your own brands, companies must brand themselves as employers.

Brett Minchington, Chairman/CEO of Employer Brand International, defines your employer brand as “the image of your organization as a ‘great place to work’ in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passive candidates, clients, customers and other key stakeholders). The art and science of employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement and retention of initiatives targeted at enhancing your company’s employer brand.”

Companies brand themselves as employers to convey to the world why their workplace is appealing in hopes of attracting good workers, which is especially important during the economic slowdown. As companies cut costs, getting the best people in the right jobs is even more crucial. Additionally, as companies expand into foreign markets competition for skilled workers increases.

While there are many ways to approach employer branding, one of the most important things is knowing who you are. Create a brand based on your company’s mission and objectives. The book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies demonstrates that companies with consistent, distinctive and deeply held values tend to outperform those companies with a less clear and articulated ethos. Product lines, profit strategies, cultural tactics, and organization structure can change – but a core ideology should not.

Your employer brand is who you are, and how others—both employees and potential candidates — view your company. Communicating your organization’s mission and values will attract and engage the like-minded talent who will directly affect your bottom line.

When was the last time you said: “I’m going to go use a search engine to look up information on tonight’s event.” The answer to that is either never, or sometime circa the early 2000′s, but since then it’s more than likely that most Americans say “I’m going to go Google more information on tonight’s event.” And that is my friend is brandverbing.

Companies like Xerox, Hoover, and even Google have gone to great lengths to avoid their brands becoming verbs, but why? When a brand becomes a verb you know that it has reached mass market consumer recognition, so wouldn’t becoming so engrained in society that your brand becomes part of the language be the ultimate degree of success for a brand?

So while others have fought hard to keep their brand from becoming a verb others are spending a lot of time and resources to make sure their brand is used as verbs by consumers in everyday life and conversation. Enter: Vanguard; an investment company who in 2010 began a highly visible campaign to turn their brand name into a verb.

The move by Vanguard shows that they too recognize the significance and potential payoff for their brand to be used in everyday language just like Xerox or Google has now experienced. And unlike a brand becoming genericized like asprin, zipper, and escalator (yup, these were all trademarked brand names at one point) a brand that becomes a verb is more appealing than its generic counterpart and has less risk in losing its brand appeal. Seth Godin, American author and speaker, said: “people care much more about verbs than nouns. They care about things that move, that are happening, that change. They care about experiences and events and the way things make us feel. Nouns just sit there, inanimate lumps. Verbs are about wants and desires and wishes.”

So if what Godin says is true, every brand should strive to be a brandverb when appropriate. After all a brand is more than a product or logo, a brand is about an experience and the expectations we have of that brand. So if becoming a brandverb will incite those feelings then what’s the big deal? These days I believe becoming a brandverb is not a kiss of death but the mark of success.