Billboard in the Wallet – Your Design. Your message. Your Brand

Employers typically focus on the external world when building their brand. Too often they overlook an audience that is actually every bit as important as the external one: the employees “living” the brand every day. How can you expect to make customers loyal to something your employees don't feel loyal to themselves?

A recent article in the Gallup Management Journal written by William J. McEwen identifies four important reasons why companies shouldn’t overlook their employees when branding.

1. Employees must keep the company's brand promise.
   
   Employees represent the company's ability to fulfill its brand promise. They're an essential ingredient, enabling the company to credibly support the message it sends to customers. There can be no meaningful customer covenant without the strong support of the company's frontline human assets.
   
2. Employees can attract and retain customers.
   
   Employees don't just live at work; they regularly interact with their relatives, friends, and neighbors. They provide a powerfully credible, albeit often indirect, human message from the company to the wide world in ways that either support or contradict the company's stated slogans. They can build and support strong platforms for customer relationships. But employees can't serve as strong supporters of a brand message they neither know nor understand.
   
3. Employees can generate support for company initiatives.
   
   Employees are members of many different communities. Their support and enthusiasm for their company's plans and programs can have a huge impact -- one that may be felt from the local town council to the state and national legislatures. Employees can serve both as emblems and ambassadors of the company's community commitment. And they can play a vital role when companies are seeking to expand operations or lobby for the reduction of cumbersome regulation. Again, however, they can't endorse or support company programs if they're uninvolved and uninformed.
   
4. Employees recruit other employees.
   
   Beyond their roles in providing word-of-mouth marketing and community-building activities, employees can also help attract and retain talent. Employees represent the front lines in the war for talent, a struggle already well underway in many industries. Employee comments can be far more influential than the company's recruitment ads, and their commitment -- or lack thereof -- is contagious.

Billboard in the Wallet

Gift cards have transformed the corporate gift giving market for businesses small and large because of the convenience and flexibility they offer. However, the missed opportunity comes from employers not branding their gift cards. When awarded to employees, gift cards almost become a permanent fixture in an employee’s wallet. They are an effective reminder to co-workers, friends, and family every time the card is pulled out and used – a “Billboard in the Wallet”.

When purchasing awards for employees, HR executives typically focus on the “pre-reward” communication. The award from the employer usually gets lost by giving cash or a branded gift card from a major retailer. Concerned about cost, inventory, and turnaround time – they often miss the trophy value in branding the gift card.

Solution Provider – Your Design. Your Message. Your Brand.

The ability to fully customize a gift card has never been easier. Using leading edge technology, smartOne® Prepaid Solutions offers employers the ability to fully customize Visa® Gift Cards with their corporate brand image. “This not just a solution that allows you to print your company logo on a pre-printed plastic….this is a solution that digitally prints fully customized Visa Gift Cards with your company’s brand image,” said Scott McCormack, Vice President of smartOne Prepaid Solutions. “Best of all, there’s no minimum order, no inventory concern, and set-up takes less than two weeks.”

Scott Anderson, President of Medical Solutions said “As a company with 300 employees, we chose smartOne Prepaid Solutions because of their ability to customize a Visa Gift Card with our brand image and no minimums. We now have a fully branded Medical Solutions Visa Gift Card that our employees can use to buy whatever they want.”

About smartOne® Prepaid Solutions

A division of First National Bank Omaha, smartOne Prepaid Solutions is a leading provider of custom Visa Gift Cards. With an in-house graphics team, smartOne Prepaid Solutions specializes in providing custom card programs with no minimums and less than 2 week implementation.

Dependent upon your overall program needs, an experienced Project Manager will work with you to develop all aspects of your program including, but not limited to the following:

• Card design, proof and printing
• Carrier design, proof and printing
• Program setup (account limits, features, BIN setup, expiration, fees, etc.)
• Card personalization (embossing, encoding, etc.)
• Shipping (US mail, Bulk Fedex)
• Transaction authorization and settlements
• Web/IVR transaction and balance inquiry
• Live multi-lingual 24/7/365 customer service

For more information on smartOne Prepaid Solutions, please visit www.smartonesolutions.com or call 1-866-778-4985.