2019 Roundup: 6 Great Articles About Brand+Culture

Are you looking for insights and inspiration on integrating external brand identity and internal corporate culture? Here are some of the pieces on the topic of brand and culture that I learned the most from this past year:

The Future of Your Workplace Depends on Your Purpose by Jennifer Robison of Gallup

This recap of a chapter in Gallup’s book, It’s The Manager, highlights how the “actionable purpose” at Unilever positively impacts everything the company does and all its stakeholder relationships, including employees.

Best bit: "Culture begins with your purpose -- why you are in business," explains It's the Manager. "It lives or dies day to day through your managers. … A world-class culture inspires your most talented employees to create superior customer experiences."

Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy from the Harvard Business Review

Even though the title of this article references “strategy,” the authors’ description of how to implement a purpose-driven strategy has everything to do with culture. They discuss how companies ranging from Mars Petcare to Finnish oil-refining firm Neste developed a vision for the future and geared up their organizations to play a vital role in it.

Best bit: “Leaders need to think hard about how to make purpose central to their strategy. The two best tactics for doing that are to transform the leadership agenda and to disseminate purpose throughout the organization.” 

Where Organizational Culture Is Headed from strategy&

The researchers at PwC’s Katzenberg Center report on surprising findings about the gap in culture perceptions between company C-suite executives & boards and the employees of those companies, including:

• 63% of leaders think “what we say about our culture is consistent with how we act;” but only 41% of employees do.
• 71% of leaders say, “Culture is an important leadership agenda item;” but only 48% of employees agree.
• 23% of employees report that leaders of their organizations have tried culture change or evolution of some form, but acknowledge that the efforts resulted in no discernible improvements.

Inspiring and Guiding Teams by Aligning Their Brand and Culture by Al Cini of BCAT Partners

This post explains the BCAT (Brand Culture Alignment Toolkit), a process that involves mapping, measuring, and ultimately improving the perception of an organization’s brand and culture alignment – including three steps: 

• Consonance – determining if everyone is “singing from the same sheet of music”
• Resonance – showing everyone how far they all are from what they see as their team’s mission
• Alignment – enabling people to identify observable changes they can make in their workplace behavior “to become better versions of themselves at work and better servants of their shared purpose”

Talent Magnets: 6 Essential Aspects of Workplace Culture by O.C. Tanner

O.C. Tanner’s survey of over 10,000 employees worldwide found six aspects of culture that people look for in a great place to work: purpose, opportunity, success, appreciation, wellbeing, and leadership. The white paper reports findings and quotes on each of these “talent magnets” and concludes that focusing on the six areas produces increases in revenues and other business results.

Best bit: “Successful organizations are more innovative, more focused, more productive, and intent on making a difference customers love. When an employee expands the influence of their job, when they go beyond what is expected, when they purposefully create improvements that benefit others, this is when they feel the most successful. And those feelings of success prove cardinal in building a great culture.”

Building and Sustaining A Culture of Innovation by the Brand Culture Company

While many companies desire to become more innovative – in perception and reality, many company leaders don’t understand that they must cultivate a culture that supports that identity. The folks at the Brand Culture Company have developed a framework that lays out six areas organizations must develop to build and sustain a culture that nurtures and promotes innovation.

Best bit: “Innovation is not just a strategy. For an organization to truly embrace and benefit from a constant flow of new ideas, it must create a culture of innovation. Innovation requires a commitment from employees to devote their energy and ideas to generating new opportunities. It requires a commitment from leadership to support exploration and tolerate failure. Culture is the key to developing this commitment.”

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This is only a sampling of the many great resources on brand and culture I came across in 2019. What are some other ones you liked and learned from?