Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Developing and Marketing your Learning and Organizational Development Brand at Corporate University Week

My live blogged notes from Corporate University Week.

Developing and Marketing your Learning and Organizational Development Brand

Judy Whitcomb SPHR
Chief Learning Officer, Vice President, Human Resources and Learning and Organizational Development
Vi (formerly Classic Residence by Hyatt)

She started off sharing stories about their organization.

Start with an analysis of how the learning brand is being perceived within your organization. Then figure out where you want to go and what you want to do? Identify 5-6 key words that you want to use to identify your brand within the org.

They started off with the perception that the learning org was a bit difficult…

Learning materials and LMS strongly aligned with their visual brand…

Keys to a successful marketing plan:

  • recognize that emotions are powerful communication tools
  • engage senior leaders in telling the story
  • involve cross-functional leaders to be advocates
  • repetition, repetition, repetition
  • leverage your business policies
  • Recognize how learning will support practices, etc.

Tent cards, emails – what’s new

Ongoing webinars to train and promote features and benefits (don’t turn on allt he features of your LMS right away – let people get used to it

Recognize results

Target learning strategy with specific needs that employees have (“how do I write a better marketing plan?”)

Company newsletters

3 comments:

Adam Weisblatt said...

Hi Camy,

What is the rational she gave for creating branding for the Learning function that is different than the company branding? I would think that if you identify with your company and do good work, you don't need to brand your function.

Adam Weisblatt

Cammy Bean said...

Hey Adam -- She's not saying we start from scratch when doing branding. In fact, your learning function's look and feel should tie in very tightly to the overall corporate brand. The branding activities she was talking about were specific to the way they want the learning organization to be perceived (and how they should perform) by the rest of the organization: so the branding reflects the specific value that the L&D group delivers. Does that make sense?

Cammy Bean said...

If you want to read more about brand in learning: check out our Kineo whitepaper "Brand-led eLearning"

http://www.kineo.com/us/elearning-reports/free-guide-brand-led-learning.html