Brand Is Culture. Or Is Culture Brand?

I recently read an article by Bill Taylor in the Harvard Business Review entitled Brand is culture, culture is brand. It was good. Just the sort of article I like. It reaffirmed my strongly held belief that for all service based brands (and I’d argue pretty much all other brands too) the proposition lives or dies by the cumulative interactions of staff with customers. And from that perspective you can’t credibly think about engaging your customers with your brand proposition until you’ve fully engaged your people with your brand proposition.

It seems common sense to me. And probably common sense to you and most other business leaders. However, this doesn’t make it common practice.

Even the most marketing-led business leaders recognise that success is not just about producing better promotional campaigns than other companies: more daring ads, more new products, more aggressive use of Twitter and Facebook. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, about caring more than other companies — about customers, about colleagues, about how the organisation conducts itself in a world with endless opportunities to cut corners and compromise on values.

That’s what leaves a positive impression on your customers, and helps you stand out from the crowd. The new “power coupling” inside the best companies, I believe, is an iron-clad partnership between marketing leadership and HR leadership. Your brand is your culture, your culture is your brand.

However, how many organisations truly embrace this new power coupling? How many HR Directors and Marketing Directors are totally on the same page? Contributing to and supporting each other’s initiatives and programmes rather than bickering and negotiating around which takes priority. The most hieness manifestation of this internal conflict? The rise of the employer brand!!! Need I say more?

So, I was intrigued to read in Bill’s article of a really interesting and innovative development he encountered at a conference he was speaking at about this very issue. After his talk, he was introduced to a banker by the name of Jana Dobbs, an executive with Corner Bank; a 138-year-old business based in Kansas. This lady handed him her business card and invited him to take a look at her job title. Jana’s title, it turns out, is senior vice president of human resources and marketing. Forget a “partnership” between HR and marketing. At Corner Bank, the two functions report to the same person. I’m sure that’s a title very few of us have seen before (although I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who does have anything like this title).

She goes on to explain that Corner Bank has a great brand position in the Kansas cities and towns in which it operates — as an advocate for the little guy in an industry dominated by giants. That means the day-to-day interactions between customers and front-line employees are a huge part of the bank’s brand identity. “Our people are our best marketing tool,” Jana explained. “Advertising is important, the design of the website is important, but if customers have a positive experience every time they come into the bank, that’s what builds our reputation. We’ve got mobile apps, we’ve got Internet banking, but what we rely on is a hometown feeling. When you walk into our bank, we know your name.”

That certainly sounds like a winning brand proposition for a small, family-owned financial institution. But I suspect it works for major organizations too. Who could argue with Jana’s views of building an authentic brand reputation?

Bill’s article goes on to highlight one such large company. An example of a big business that embraces the connection between brand and culture and executes it impeccably. That company is USAA, an insurance and financial-services juggernaut based in Texas.

USAA is a huge operation with 7.4 million members, 21,000 employees, and annual revenues of $18 billion. What most distinguishes USAA, though, is that it only does business with active or retired members of the U.S. military and their families. That’s the customer base it serves — and it serves those customers unbelievably well. Its customer-loyalty rankings are off the charts and it has become a legendary brand, both in terms of technology innovation and service.

One reason for its strong performance as a brand is the strong sense of identification between its front-line employees and its customers. USAA does business almost exclusively over the phone and the Internet, and it has more than 13,000 customers-service reps. The company has a much-admired training program in which employees learn the myriad technical skills they need to work efficiently. But what they really learn is to empathise with and see the world through the eyes of a soldier on active duty in Afghanistan who needs to send money to a sick parent, the wife of a soldier in Iraq who needs to finance a car, and all of the other unique pressures and demands on its 7.4 million members.

How do employees develop that sense of empathy? A BusinessWeek feature tells the story well. When they are about to start their training, employees review “deployment letters” that real soldiers get: “Report to the personnel processing-facility” tomorrow, the letter reads, and get your affairs in order beforehand. They eat MREs (meals ready to eat) on many occasions during their training, to get a “taste” for the life of a soldier. They walk around in 65-pound backpacks. They read actual letters from soldiers in the field to their families back home. USAA calls it “Surround Sound” — immerse employees in the real life and emotional needs of customers. “There is nobody on this earth who understands their customer better than USAA,” one consultant has said.

That kind of personal identification between employees and customers is what gives USAA the drive to not just provide great service but to unleash big innovations. For example, it was the first financial-services company to allow customers to deposit checks by iPhone. You get a paper check, you take a photo with your iPhone, and email it to the bank. It was the first financial-services company to allow you to check deposit balances via text message. You text your account number and get a return text with the relevant information. USAA has proven itself to be a technology leader — not because the company is obsessed with technology, but because it is obsessed with customers.

The simple lesson behind the success of both small-fry Corner Bank and big-boy USAA: you can’t be special, distinctive, and compelling in the marketplace unless you create something special, distinctive, and compelling in the workplace.

So the question for me isn’t whether your brand and your culture are related. They quite clearly are. They’re inseparable. The more intriguing question is whether your brand informs your culture or your culture informs your brand.

More on that topic in my next blog.