A little bit greater than a 12 months in the past, Ken Garff Automotive Group in Utah was planning to spotlight its model values in a coaching marketing campaign aimed toward its 4,500 workers.

Then the world modified. The COVID-19 pandemic led to the demise of Chairman Bob Garff in March 2020 and gave staffers a distinct lens by which to see the group’s philosophy.

The intent of the marketing campaign was to take workers out of the showroom and current Ken Garff’s 5 tenets — respect, integrity, development, humility and teamwork — by a collection of professionally shot promotional movies at convention rooms and film theaters. The well being disaster altered that imaginative and prescient and turned the enrichment effort right into a largely digital affair on the group’s on-line hub, however it did not diminish the marketing campaign’s scope.

Whereas retailers adjusted to doing enterprise within the COVID-19 period as they sought to cater to customers, Garff Automotive made certain to spend money on its workers as properly throughout a making an attempt interval.

These aren’t ho-hum movies with managers lecturing the staff. The collection consists of motivational segments that includes Utah Jazz legend Mark Eaton, a 7-foot-4 shot blocker, and endurance athlete Colin O’Brady sharing messages that tie in with the group’s chosen theme throughout a specific quarter.

The content material for O’Brady, who summited the tallest peak on every of the world’s seven continents in report time, was shot earlier than the pandemic however aligned with the perils of the second when it was launched. O’Brady’s message centered on having a development mindset and overcoming obstacles, a becoming theme.

“Doing campaigns like this and content material like this for our workers exhibits we will put critical funding in opposition to this,” Matt Jensen, vice chairman of selling, advised Automotive Information. “This all takes a variety of time and some huge cash to go construct all these items out, and it is a strategy to present our workers that we care about this. We watch the feedback that folks submit on our intranet, and we take heed to suggestions from [general managers and human resource] managers. It is close to universally constructive.”

The interior marketing campaign, whose slogan is “Deal with folks proper. Repeat,” options workers from shops throughout the nation along with outsiders equivalent to Eaton and O’Brady. It additionally has sought to combine in voices of minority staffers to get their views on working for Garff shops.

Jensen mentioned almost all workers have watched each video.

The staff simply completed 1 / 4 centered on integrity and is popping to humility now. Jensen mentioned a few of the themes, equivalent to teamwork, have taken on a distinct hue throughout the pandemic.

Some workers members have been viewing the content material in small teams at dealerships and discussing it afterward. The movies had been shot by Spinoff, the group’s inside advert company.

“Speaking about teamwork in a pandemic versus teamwork outdoors of a pandemic, I imply, it modified how we considered that,” Jensen mentioned. “Similar factor with the humility content material we’re beginning to create proper now. I believe that’ll change our ideas there. A part of humility is recognizing what others are going by, and with the ability to cease and take heed to others.

“Each our workers and our clients have gone by a extremely exhausting 12 months in a variety of methods.”