Strategygram: The Rhino and The Oxpecker

When different biological species are compelled to occupy the same territory in Nature, we witness one of three primary symbiotic relationships—commensalism?(where one species benefits from its association with another without harming or helping it),?parasitism?(where one species—the parasite—lives on another species as its host), or?mutualism?(where both species benefit from each other)—and that makes us contemplate the relationship between an organisation’s culture and its brands: what it is and what it should be.

We have all seen serene images of cute little birds—red-billed or yellow-billed oxpeckers—sitting on the backs of rhinoceroses in sub-Saharan Africa and smiled at what appears to be mutualistic behaviour. In exchange for the safe habitat that an oxpecker gets on the rhinoceros’s back, it eats the ticks, flies, and bugs troubling the rhinoceros. Furthermore, because rhinos are short-sighted, the bird also acts as an alarm system, creating a commotion through hissing when the oxpecker spots an approaching threat like a lion, hyena, or human poacher. The Swahili name for the oxpecker honours this relationship:?askari wa kifaru,?meaning “the rhino’s guard”.

And yet, when we examine this iconic symbiosis closely, we note there’s more to it: a rhino’s skin is thick but sensitive, with plenty of blood supply just underneath it. When an oxpecker drills into a rhino’s skin to eat botfly larvae and other parasites, it uproots the scabs on the rhino’s back, making the sores slower to heal. Furthermore, the oxpecker sucks the rhino’s blood through the open sores.??

When we look at the relationship between an organisation’s culture and its brands, what do we see—at first glance, yes, but also on closer scrutiny?

We know that a differentiated and superior brand experience doesn’t begin with a brand; it begins further back, in the organisational culture that births the brand and then acts as?the primary filter for what a brand perceives and practices.?

The organisation's culture acts as the primary filter for what a brand perceives and practices.

There is irony in the situation, of course: the people who are customarily entrusted with steering the fortunes of a brand—inhabitants of marketing departments—have little or no control over the organisation’s culture. Brand managers may have some influence on an organisation’s culture, but certainly no control.

Nonetheless, marketplace success depends on a relationship that is symbiotically productive: the organisation’s culture powers the brand, while the brand provides feedback about external-world realities so that the organisation can adapt and evolve with institutional intelligence and imagination.??

An organisation’s culture—how the organisation?behaves,?based on its?self-image?derived from what it believes, cherishes, and intends—impacts a brand’s?purpose, point of distinction, and personality. This is where the alignment between the organisation’s culture and its brand (or brand portfolio) gets intriguing.?

An organisation's culture impacts a brand's purpose, point of distinction, and personality.

Consider, for example, the power of an organisation’s culture to foreclose opportunities for its brand.?

When the world’s leading maker of semiconductor chips for computers was approached in 2007 by a Cupertino-based company to make chips for the launch of its category-redefining product—a smartphone—the chip-maker declined. It saw itself as a high-volume, high-margin business and didn’t think mobile devices would give it the volumes it needed; instead, making those chips would cut the company’s vaunted profitability.?

In an interview published in?The Atlantic?on May 16, 2013, the company’s then-CEO admitted: “We ended up not winning it or passing on it [the contract to make chips for the smartphone], depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it. The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do...At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought. The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes.”

Actually, the problem wasn’t the cost?forecast,?the problem was lack of institutional?foresight.?Even at the time the company made the fateful decision, hundreds of millions of feature phones were being sold all over the world. The inquiring mind therefore ponders: was the brand’s purpose—to provide computing power—short-circuited by the organisation’s culture and self-concept?

The company tried to play catch-up, but it was too late; between the iOS and the Android operating systems, the market for not just smartphones but also subsequently tablets was shut out for the brand. As one tech publication asked in December 2020: “How did [this company] manage to spend up to $10 billion and have so little to show for it?”

The problem wasn't the cost forecast, the problem was lack of institutional foresight.

You know that it is much easier for a competitor to copy your strategy than it is to copy your company’s culture. Your company’s culture is a stronger and more resilient part of your competitive advantage. But it must be curated from that perspective because even though all organisations have unique cultures, not all cultures are special.

Of interest to us in this discussion, though, is organisational culture and its alignment with a brand’s purpose, point of distinction, and personality.?

Let’s say you are a company making athletic shoes and athletic gear and your mission is to serve the athlete in us. What if you, as this sports brand, seek to hire only those people who are into athletics and sport, reasoning that if a person doesn’t vibe with the brand’s ethos and intent, then that person would be better off working elsewhere.?

That seems reasonable, but consider the implications: should you turn down a first-rate accountant just because she isn’t a sports enthusiast? Should you turn away a handicapped person because he can’t engage in athletic activity? At what point does the focus on hiring “our kind of people” slide into rejecting “the other—not our type”?

In an organisation, you don’t need like-minded people; you need people who can work through and despite their differences. Contrast and collaboration trump consistency and conformity.?A brand must have focus, true, but that focus must come from?cohesive transmuted diversity,?otherwise the brand will be shorn of the resilience to adapt and evolve in fulfilment of its purpose.?

In an organisation, you don’t need like-minded people; you need people who can work through and despite their differences. Contrast and collaboration trump consistency and conformity.

Take a look at the world’s foremost e-commerce company, whose brand maintains lower prices as a major aspect of its point of distinction. Frugality is enshrined as a core value: “We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to customers.”

A former employee said: “When I worked [there], nobody flew first class. Everybody stayed in budget hotels. The company didn’t pay for anybody’s cell phone bill. Most importantly, this low-cost culture was executed consistently from top to bottom.”

A story is told—is this apocryphal?—about a person who joined the company as a vice president at its U.S. headquarters. On his first day in the office, he was about to sign some papers, when he noticed there wasn’t a ballpoint pen on his desk as part of his stationery supplies. So he asked his secretary to order some ballpoint pens.?

The secretary returned to his office a while later and said that the finance manager had declined to approve the order.?

The vice president stormed over to the finance manager’s cabin and confronted him: “Am I not authorised to order ballpoint pens?”

“Yes, you are,” replied the finance manager calmly. “I can sign off on the order for you right away, but you must then expect a phone call from [the company’s founder-CEO] asking you to explain why you needed the company to buy you a ballpoint pen.”

The vice president decided he didn’t really want the ballpoint pens, after all.

You may characterise this company’s culture as frugal or as penny-pinching, but what is incontestable is that the organisation’s culture reinforced the brand’s point of distinction of lower prices for customers through eschewing avoidable costs in the organisation.

Consider the case of a group of companies founded by a flamboyant British multi-billionaire,?where over 400 companies, spanning an enormously diverse range of industries, operate under a single umbrella brand name.

The challenge of having an organisational culture that supports a coherent brand personality across a plethora of businesses—from trains and planes to hotels and bank branches, from wines and condoms to space tourism and vaults for blood stem cells—burgeoning over five decades and across five continents is a Herculean task, and yet it has been accomplished, not least by the founder, who epitomises the brand’s exciting, fun-loving, iconoclastic personality.?

This brand’s mission is to provide a fairer deal for customers than they have been getting in each category. Within the ambit of that brand purpose and brand personality, employees are inculcated with the brand’s ethos through a multi-week training programme and then, as one report puts it, “given the freedom to own, inhabit and express the brand values through their own individual personalities.”

Personality creates preference.

A brand will always aim to be functionally superior to its competition but even when a brand isn’t evidently better in?performance,?it can be evocatively better in?pleasing?the customer and hence becoming her preferred choice.?Personality creates preference.

By supporting these three aspects of a brand—its purpose, point of distinction, and personality—an organisation’s culture makes a brand?relevant, remarkable, and relatable.?Who could ask for a better symbiotic relationship?

Sattar Khan

This Strategygram titled ‘The Rhino and The Oxpecker’ is part of the series I’ve created where each Strategygram condenses one strategic thought into one image.?

The series is a visual guide to strategic thinking and provides handy image prompts for brand strategy workouts.??

#strategygrams ?#visualthinking ?#branddifferentiation #brandstrategy #brandexperience #clarity ?#visualstorytelling #story #strategy #strategist ?