Light Their Fire: Using Internal Marketing to Ignite Employee Performance and Wow Your Customers

by Susan Drake, Sara M. Roberts, Michelle Gulman

Book Overview

Write a brilliant business plan, ignore employees, and watch the plan tank. Or, involve employees, infuse them with loyalty, and watch results skyrocket Companies spend millions of dollars devising... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1419502522
• ISBN13: 9781419502521
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Dearborn Trade
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Basic Manual on Employee Loyalty

This basic manual teaches you how to encourage your employees to buy into your business strategy and brand before you begin selling to real-world customers. Internal marketing programs should be part of every company's operations. Authors Susan M. Drake, Michelle J. Gulman and Sara M. Roberts show that motivated, energetic employees are important assets; they can expand your business exponentially. Simply by fulfilling basic human desires for recognition, advancement, esteem and education, you can build tremendous employee loyalty. Written in a light, breezy style, which occasionally might have benefited from more detail, this book provides examples of companies that have instituted exceptional programs. We strongly recommend it to executives, small business owners, and human resource and department managers looking for strategies to energize their companies by using their most valuable resource: their people.

Light Their Fire

We are always trying to attract new customers. We seek new and attractive ways to bring them into our work places, but we forget that some of our best advertizers are the people who work for us. Light Their Fire focuses on pulling our employees into the advertizing mix and making them part of the equation of success. Sections of the book also focus on planning, which we all lack. We have meeting with staff and plan for the meetings only hours in advance. What are you going to focus on but the negitives rather than the positives. Proper planning starts when, if not before, the meeting is scheduled. Well worth the time to read.

Invaluable for managers, marketers!

The catchy title of this book first caught my eye. But as I started reading it I soon realized I had stumbled onto a gem! "Light my Fire" discusses an aspect of management that has historically been a step child of traditional management programs, i.e. empathetic management. As a manager, I found it incredibly insightful that internal marketing can help demonstrate an empathetic management and communication style, leading to many more strategic benefits other than high employee satisfaction. To highlight the ROI from investing in such efforts the authors' have conducted a thorough research into real-life scenarios that clearly show tangible results from internal marketing efforts! Overall, not only have the authors clearly articulated the value of internal marketing but they have also shared the mechanics of conducting an effective internal marketing campaign! Most definitely a practical guide, this book is also a fun read! I strongly recommend it for senior executives who are responsible for maximizing departmental/company-wide performance as well as for any manager who is responsible for motivating and managing others' careers.

"Light Their Fire" Lit My Fire

Drake, Gulman and Roberts taught me how I can market my company and my brand to the one group of people I give short shrift to. No, not my customers, but my employees. Like most people, I spend all of my energies trying to communicate with and market to new clients, and then I focus on existing clients. I just don't spend enough time communicating with my own employees and then I get surprised when they can't read my mind. "Light Their Fire" goes beyond generalities about the need to communicate better to internal employees. It gives you step-by-step ways of making internal branding a part of every thing you do. Whether it is videoconferencing or setting up employee email newsletters, this book tells you what to do, how to maximize its effectiveness and then gives great success case studies. I am often suspicious of books written by several authors, but "Light Their Fire" doesn't have the voice of a dumbed-down committee. Instead, the lively personalities of each writer spill out on page after page. This was the most fun I've had reading a business book in a long time.

Beyond a "Must Read"

Light Their Fire is a brilliantly enjoyable read that as well is enjoyably brilliant. A philosophical manual with genuine utility, book provides granular, rubber-meets-the-road advice on creating positive outcomes for businesses of all types and sizes, from the struggling non-profit to the already market-dominant blue-chip. Silver generation CEO's and still-green startup entrepreneurs will find lessons they can each benefit from and immediately enact. The authors manage to outfit the reader with a handbook for the creation and nurturing of greatness in businesses while maintaining the ability to understand the global themes and principles and macro-view under which the business landscape operates. The provocative title of this book is true in many ways -- as the sparks contained in its pages will inspire a reader to immolate bales of low quality ideas while setting aflame the furnace of progress. There are few books that are a "must read." Light Their Fire is a "must read over and over."