Branding & Culture

What is a brand?

A brand represents a collection of perceptions about how a company is seen, felt and talked about.

How to distill what your brand is about?

By having a purpose - a unique reason for being - which is the brand glue that holds everything together.

Take the example of GlaxoSmithKline, a multinational pharma company:

Their consumer truth was that everybody is frightened of disease. Their brand truth was that they spend more in R&D than any other company in the world. So it follows that their purpose should be: No one fights disease more than GSK.

This gives their employees a mission and their consumers a promise that is substantiated in a reason to believe. It also helps the brand to keep its communication brutally simple - there is just one thing to remember. No more using the "dreaded word" in a briefing, which is indisputably "AND".

How are killer brands born?

Inside out. In order to be relevant to consumers and sustainable over time, a brand must operate much like a culture, with an ethos and a worldview that it absolutely believes in, acting in accordance with it in everything it does. By having a culture in which employees live their brand's values, they will build up an internal net promoter score and become ambassadors. If that culture is attractive to consumers, they will embrace the brand as part of their own identity. Some perfect examples of this are Zappos and Google.

Branding is very much like a tree, the roots - the culture, beliefs and values - aren't visible but that doesn't make them any less important. In that sense, there should be no difference between the customer and the internal customer, because the latter is who is responsible for bringing the customer experience to life.

It seems like the new “power couple” inside the best companies is a partnership between Marketing and HR. Your brand is your culture, your culture is your brand.