Brand equals Culture

What is the relationship between your Organizational Culture and your Brand?

It daunted on me in 2010 that culture and branding were the same thing when I was invited to join an international Think-Tank group focused on conscious branding. The Medinge Group (https://medinge.org/), founded in Sweden in 2000, unites branding experts around the world to promote conscious organizations.

I had never thought of myself as a brand expert, yet, Medinge’s definition of brand is inclusive of the organization’s beliefs, values and behaviors, a short definition for corporate culture.

Inside-out branding

How can you promote a brand externally without first healing your organization internally? Can you strongly position a brand in a competitive marketplace if its very own employees and collaborators do not believe in it? How many lies do you have to tell in order to sell your products? It’s like trying to promote yourself at a job interview when you know you are not the right fit; you have to lie here and there… it will not work. 

In December 2014 Merriam-Webster named ‘Culture’ the word of the year, with more than 100 million searches per month. Previous winners were: ‘Pragmatic’ (2011), ‘Socialism & Capitalism’ (2012), and ‘Selfie’ (2013). Why in 2014 many people were concerned about culture?

This indicates that corporate America is struggling to figure out how to proactively develop an engaging and thriving culture/brand. Is that possible? And if so, how? For years, efforts have been placed into the external side of branding, which is what we basically call marketing. How can I better position my products and services into the marketplace, how can I better distribute and sell them? Today, smart CEOs and successful entrepreneurs understand that the average consumer, much better informed than before the Internet era, are smarter buyers and traditional marketing techniques are no longer making the difference. If anything, they can temporarily move some product inventory risking obsolescence before launching your new product. These are short term operational solutions but hardly will make a company successful.

The real key is then to understand how to create a culture that attracts the best talent worldwide, whom, thanks to our empowering and engaging culture, will create all those innovative and wonderful products and services that will position us ahead of the competition. The Good Jobs found that 98% of job seekers value “Company Culture” at least as much as compensation.

Internal marketing 

If you are still with me here and believe that the road to success is to create an engaging and powerful corporate culture, the question is: How do you do that? If you don’t have the luxury of starting your company now and be thinking about this proactively from the start, you are joining the majority of organizations trying to transform or re-vitalize their existing organizational culture into something else. Welcome to the club!

You can look at my previous LinkedIn posts for tools and techniques to do so, but to make things really simple, you need to change the way your employees and collaborators think about your brand/culture.

 Consider the following 3 steps: 

• Assess your current culture/brand. What is the ‘health’ of your organization? The current state.
• Define the desired future state. What are the key elements you would like to see changing and why? Think in terms of people’s behaviors, whether you want to affect them through a new set of values, leadership competencies or guiding principles.
• Lead by example and influence others to do the same. Here is where you can use marketing techniques that have traditionally been used to affect consumer purchasing decisions to influence the behaviors of your internal community of employees.

In sum, other than assessing what do you need to change, deploy the full power of human and social psychology to transform your organization from the inside out. Most organizations have talented brand and marketing professionals! Put them to design the internal campaign. There is only one catch to this; you will have to be authentic. You cannot transform your organization if you don’t transform yourself and your senior leadership team first. Your intent will not even get off the ground without it. 

You may need less of a marketing team and more of a corporate culture one. If you build a thriving culture, in the fast and highly interconnected Internet era we are living, your external brand image will take care of itself!