Brand-Culture Fusion Remains A Top Priority

The integration and alignment of brand and culture remains even more important today than ever even though my book FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest Companies was released three years ago. 

That’s why I’ve released a new LinkedIn Learning Course, Brand Leadership: Integrating Brand and Culture. It lays out a playbook for achieving brand leadership by aligning and integrating your external brand identity and internal organizational culture.

To explain the value of this course, we need to acknowledge that culture and brand have become in recent years even more powerful drivers of business performance. And although they are so vital independently, their full potential is unleashed when they are fused together. With brand-culture fusion, the two nuclei of your organization -- your culture (the way the people in your organization behave and the attitudes and beliefs that inform them and your brand or brand identity (how your organization is understood by customers and other stakeholders) – are seamlessly woven together and therefore mutually reinforcing.

Brand-culture fusion enables your organization to grow and thrive -- and offset risk and crises – in today’s challenging business environment because it addresses growing trends in our new reality, including:

The need to unify and align employees has grown. Remote work has become the new norm, with a PwC survey finding that 78% of CEOs believe remote collaboration is here to stay for the long-term and Upwork projecting that 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely by 2025 (an 87% percent increase from pre-pandemic levels.) The effect of the pandemic, economic slowdown, and social issues of the last year have increased the variability between people within an organization’s workforce – by gender, ethnicity, age, and/or socioeconomic status, not to mention mental health and wellbeing. The overarching purpose and core values at the core of brand-culture fusion provide some of the “glue” that can bind increasingly diverse and dispersed organizations together.

The pace at which businesses must operate has accelerated. Organizational agility and speed to change were growing in importance well before the pandemic, but the coronavirus introduced and solidified a new pace of change. During the pandemic, New York City mayoral candidate and former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang observed, “We’re experiencing 10 years of change in 10 weeks.” Sustaining this accelerated pace is the key to continued success. McKinsey reports that executives and directors at organizations that are significantly faster than their competitors report significant outperformance in profitability, operational resilience, organizational health, and growth compared with leaders in slower organizations. As such, business leaders need workforces that are more motivated, focused, and clear about their priorities.

Brand authenticity has become even more important. For many, the COVID-19 crisis served as a litmus test of the true character of a company and the authenticity of its brand. One case in point is the media coverage and public uproar over Amazon’s treatment of its warehouse workers. A survey by Stackla found that 90% of consumers now say that authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support. Consumers are paying attention to how companies engage their employees, support their communities, and practice DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) -- and companies have discovered the consequences of projecting an external image that conflicts, or simply even is inconsistent, with the ways it operates internally.

The war for talent has escalated.  COVID-19 may have caused a temporary spike in talent supply relative to demand, but now Businessweek reports that over 90% of small business owners looking to hire reported few or no qualified applicants for the jobs they were trying to fill last month. And Lisa Lewin, the CEO of General Assembly, says, “The pandemic accelerated digitization of work, creating shortages of talent in such fields as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analysis, security, and network engineering. So, companies need to ensure they have a compelling culture to attract the best candidates to join and stay at their organizations.

Sustainable competitive advantage has grown more elusive. In a new book, Ruthless Consistency, Dr. Michael Canic explains that evolving markets, changing social norms, and emerging technologies have made sustainable competitive advantage a myth. Moreover, in a Brookings Institute paper, MIT Professor Nancy Rose explains the pandemic-induced economic crisis – in which widespread firm closures and fewer new business entrants enabled large, well-positioned firms to dramatically increase their market shares -- has exacerbated concerns about the state of business competition in the U.S. If executives are to have any hope of competing and winning in today’s environment, it won’t come from the traditional means of competition such as product innovation, pricing, or distribution. More likely, intangible dimensions will dominate a company’s unique value proposition.

All of these trends point to the continued relevance of brand-culture fusion – and its importance in driving brand leadership. Now more than ever, business leaders need to prioritize the alignment and integration of brand and culture.

Learn more about how brand-culture fusion creates valuable engagement with your customers and employees, improves your competitiveness, and future-proofing your business in my new LinkedIn Learning Course.

More on brand-culture fusion in these posts too:

• All Types of Organizations Need Brand-Culture Fusion
• How to Cultivate Brand-Culture Fusion
• How To Scale Culture