Key Messages
From Brand To Culture: Fusing The Two Together To Unleash Corporate Power
Today, it’s essential to not only recognize but capitalize on the power of fusing brand with culture.
The giants of the business world understand this and leverage it to give them a competitive edge in the market.
Fusing your brand and culture together seamlessly will unlock tremendous potential for your organization.
You can start by identifying core values, pinning down your company’s purpose, performing a cultural audit and engaging in rituals regularly.
This process isn’t easy, but if you do it right, you’ll be rewarded with a huge burst of energy that can propel you forward.
To see how effective this strategy can be, look no further than companies such as Volkswagen, Airbnb and Amazon who know the importance of fusing their brand with culture – sometimes achieving incredible results but other times facing harsh consequences for getting it wrong.
Harnessing the power of combining brand with culture is an essential part of staying ahead in today’s cut-throat business world – master this process and you’ll be well on your way to success!
Harness The Power Of Brand-Culture Fusion To Achieve Cosmic Success
When a company’s external brand is combined with its internal culture, it creates something powerful: fusion.
This can be seen in cosmic examples such as the sun, where two atoms are combining to create something much larger and more energetic.
It’s also seen in successful companies like Amazon, where their external brand of relentless innovation is matched by an internally competitive environment.
Fusion has three main benefits for businesses.
First, it brings everyone on the same page and makes the company’s overarching purpose crystal clear.
Second, it gives the company a competitive edge because reproducing how they do things is harder than imitating what they do, making them hard to imitate.
Finally, fusion makes a company authentic, since no one else will have the exact same combination of external brand and internal culture – giving them credibility among their customers.
When a business merges their external branding with their internal culture through fusion, it increases employee efficiency and sets them apart from others in terms of authenticity and competitiveness – allowing for true success like that of celestial bodies like the Sun or companies like Amazon.
Unlock The Potential Of Your Company’S Purpose And Core Values
If you want to achieve true fusion between your brand and culture, it’s essential that you first understand your company’s purpose.
Your purpose is why you exist, as a business, and can be an incredibly powerful tool to keep your organization in sync.
To figure out what your company’s purpose is, one great exercise is the Five Whys: begin by describing your product or service, then ask yourself why what your offering is important – and follow this up with four more why-questions.
Doing this will help you get to the heart of and identify the core of what drives your existence.
Alongside finding out what your purpose means for you as a business, consider also identifying and articulating its core values.
Core values are how you express that purpose via examples from within the company of how it should act – such as whether collaboration or quality would be prioritised – so that it needs no further explanation.
By clearly knowing both what drives you as an organization and also how exactly people should conduct themselves within these confines, employees have firm guidelines for their behaviours and a unified ethos to hold them together – which culminate in achieving complete fusion between external brand and internal culture.
Understanding Your Brand Type And Conducting A Culture Audit Can Help Build A Firm Foundation Of Core Values
If you wish to construct a strong foundation of core values for your company, it is essential to start by identifying your brand type.
There are nine different brand types, namely Disruptive, Conscious, Service, Innovative, Value, Performance, Luxury, Style and Experience.
Each category requires companies to provide unique strategies and allow them gain diverse competitive positions in the market.
For example, if you fall under the category of Service Brands like Ritz-Carlton then you should make customer care one of your core values along with humbleness and empathy.
In addition to that if you are labeled as a luxury brand such as Burberry then setting high standards for quality would be a huge priority for you.
Once you have identified your brand type it’s time to do a culture audit which will give insights into how well-aligned those values are with what is currently in practice within your organization.
This can be done by looking at the ways communication and customer service is handled (such as notes sent out or online-chat) or assessing the policies and procedures in place (dress code or vacation time policies).
After that step has been finished, an assessment can be conducted as to whether these current practices upholds the core values which were identified earlier on.
By properly recognizing your brand type’s core values and actively tracking them through conducting a culture audit, businesses will find themselves with powerful foundations that they can build upon effectively.
How To Create Brand-Culture Fusion By Aligning Purpose, Encouraging Communication, And Promoting Core Values
Leadership is crucial to achieving successful brand-culture fusion.
This can be exemplified in the cases of Alan Mulally, who was the CEO of Ford Motor Company during the 2008 financial crisis, and Volkswagen’s leader for decades.
Mulally understood that for an effective fusion between his company’s influenctal external image and its internal purpose needed to take place, which he sought to achieve by re-introducing Henry Ford’s original vision of “building a car for the great multitude”.
His consistent communication of company values made it clear what was expected from employees, leading to a culture where honesty and progress were emphasized and valued.
However, things couldn’t have been more different at Volkswagen.
The incredibly poor decisions by their leadership team led them to present an inaccurate report on their emission levels which discredited any sort of trust and authenticity they had built over many years with their consumers and influenced others to stay away from the company.
This illustrates how important it is that leaders actively communicate their values and stick to them while making decisions.
It also highlights why leaders should ensure those they hire reflect their core business values; this will naturally flow through all aspects of the organization producing more successful outcomes overall.
How Combining Company Culture And Structure Leads To Better Business Outcomes
It’s no secret that company culture and structure play a huge role in an organization’s success.
They have to go hand-in-hand for a business to achieve its desired goals.
To help illustrate this point, let’s look at the software giant Adobe as an example.
In order to effectively support their new focus on customer sales, Adobe made some strategic structural changes.
For one, they merged the customer service and human resources departments into one, forming the “customer and employee experience” division that set about championing their new customer-focused culture.
This is a clear illustration of how important it can be for organizations to match end-goals with both cultural and structural approaches.
For instance; if traditional approaches are not producing desired results it may be time to create new rules or roles such as LinkedIn’s “Culture Champions” – people within the organization dedicated solely to making sure employees have a happy and productive working environment experience.
If you want your team members aligned behind your vision, you must establish the desired culture by structuring your company correctly.
Google has instituted its own rule of seven – ensuring each employee is always only seven people away from somebody with decision-making authority who can take their idea or suggestion (particularly promising ones) and turn them into realities.
Through implementing strategies like these and others, companies can certainly reap rewards when it comes to optimized success through improving culture and better structuring their business models for optimal performance.
How To Craft An Experience To Fuse Brand And Culture In Your Company
Airbnb is an example of a company that has realized the strength that lies in brand–culture fusion and has worked hard to reinforce this idea.
To do this, Airbnb does not only focus on providing their customers with the best experience possible but also on aligning their employee experience (EX) closely with their customer experience (CX).
To achieve this understanding and alignment, Airbnb first breaks their employees into groups and then identifies which interactions between employees and customers are the most important.
They also pay close attention to which experiences they should provide to their most valuable employee groups.
This could include things like education opportunities, basic training and onboarding activities as well as tangible elements like office layout, technology and communication guidelines.
Having a unified EX and CX not only strengthens corporate culture but can even help increase customer satisfaction, making it easier for companies to make more meaningful connections with their target customers.
By creating experiences that reflect the core values of both their employees and customers, businesses heighten the chance of getting closer to brand–culture fusion.
How Rituals And Artifacts Help Companies Bring Their Values To Life
Rituals and artifacts are powerful tools in nurturing and developing a strong corporate culture.
That’s why at Salesforce, they use Hawaiian-themed rituals and objects to add tangible form to the otherwise abstract concept of their company culture.
They do this by using a Hawaiian concept called ohana, which means family, using a Hawaiian greeting – “aloha”, which means “love”, signing off emails with the sign-off “mahalo” and by having every Friday as Hawaiian shirt day.
Similarly, Salesforce uses artifacts such as naming their conference rooms after Hawaiian words like ‘Maka Luana’ or ‘Hala Kahiki’.
These objects serve to make visible the ohana-oriented culture within the workplace and act as visual manifestations of their core values.
When thinking of cuying rituals or artifacts for your company’s culture, it is essential to identify any suitable actions that emphasize core values first in order to pick out the right activities for your firm.
Whether you pick up inspiration from another culture or come up with something completely new – just make sure that what ever activity you chose reinforces your own unique set of values!
Using Brand-Engagement Programs To Deepen Employee Commitment To Your Brand’S Identity
For a successful brand–culture fusion, you need to engage your employees with your brand until the two become one.
One great way to do this is by using a brand-engagement program.
Mitchell International is an example of a software company that has mastered this technique; prior to their day-long event called “The Mitchell Way Day”, they developed a number of exhibits to illustrate how customer service was driven by core values.
For instance, one team used the swing of a golf club as a metaphor for their process.
These activities help bring out employee creativity and strengthen their commitment to the brand.
You can try setting up customer listening booths where employees can hear recordings of customers discussing their experiences with your brand; hearing feedback directly from customers makes it easier for them to identify areas for improvement and develop empathy towards them.
Alternatively, you could ask employees to seek out images that capture the identity of your brand and create a collage – this exercise helps reiterate what they already know as well as serve as important reminder of what it means to be part of your organization
Using Internal Culture To Build A Successful Brand
If you want to strengthen your brand, then a great way to do it is to build your brand identity by leveraging company culture.
That’s exactly what Patagonia does – their internal decisions are in line with the goal of helping the environment, which resonates strongly with their external message.
Patagonia’s commitment to using organic cotton, recycling materials and accepting used clothes donations for reselling helps them reinforce their environmental conservation brand identity.
By keeping their core values in mind when making decisions, you can determine the type of brand you want yours to be: Innovative, performance-oriented or anything else that resonates with your business’ values.
Overall, successful brands require a perfect fusion between what is done internally and what is presented externally as the footprint of your business.
Leveraging company culture will help establish this important connection between core values and brand identity.
Wrap Up
The main takeaway from Fusion is that we should never underestimate the power of a strong company brand, nor the power of an effective corporate culture.
When these two work in tandem – when they are fused together and allowed to interact – then this creates a truly cosmic force, one that both customers and employees are inspired by.
By fusing your company’s internal and external efforts, you can create an atmosphere in which customers feel motivated to engage with the brand and employees are just as motivated to be part of the culture.
This is essential if you want to get the most out of your business performance.
