Igniting Employees as Brand Evangelists

Shiselweni Forestry Company (SFC) has managed to make it on to Yati Marketing’s Top Brands Swaziland 2016 survey as one of the most recognized companies’ countrywide. We argue that this is because of the size of their employment base with 500 permanent employees and 900 temporal workers.

In Swaziland’s context, the employ at SFC is quite substantial when compared to the population in the Shiselweni region. This has worked out well as a brand equity builder for SFC as the numbers ensured widespread knowledge of the brand as well as top of mind awareness.  It has also gone as far as creating programs to enlighten their internal stakeholder and in the process intentionally or unintentionally turning them into brand ambassadors. The company under the South African group of companies, Forestry South Africa, implemented three skills development programs for their employees. Employees are sent to institutions that offer these programs and their skills are honed in order for them to perform better professionally and achieve higher levels of employment.

According to Central Statistical Office data, each household has an average of 5 people. With 1,400 employees it means the SFC brand reaches about 7,000 people. The younger population in that statistic may interact with an assumed average of 3 friends who also have friends. Therefore if all the employees constantly talk about their work, it will certainly rub off on the young ones giving SFC a large pool of Brand Evangelists.

This means that if your brand happens to have a large workforce, you can take advantage of it by turning them into brand evangelist/ambassadors. Giving them merchandise like t-shirts, juice bottles, and other branded materials to share with their families and teaching them about what you do, your values, mission, customer value proposition may also certainly act as a catalyst to brand evangelism.