A marketing strategy is useless without the right people to execute it. In this sense, brand culture marketing, the philosophy that soaks everything in an organization, helps connect the right people with the actions that motivate them.
Culture is the fuel of the brand
Building a strong and consistent culture requires a good foundation in the following blocks according to the Fast Company Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch post :
- Dynamic and committed leadership
- Good communicators who clearly establish the vision, mission, and values of the company and create an adequate environment to carry them out.
Live Values
It’s not about putting the values in a powerpoint, it’s about directing the behavior of the people who make up the company. That these values filter the selection of employees and new people can enter the company sharing the same principles to enhance them and keep them evolving.
Responsibility
Culture empowers people, a power that recognizes their talents and gives them a responsibility to carry out their tasks by making their own decisions independently.
Celebrate success and failure
If people have the power to make decisions independently (“Great power implies great responsibility”), let’s celebrate their successes, but also failures as a way to keep moving forward and serve as learning for the entire organization.
First culture, then strategy.
Brand positioning and culture
The Companies establish contact with the outside according to their particular vision of the world, their values, and beliefs, their own culture. The latter is a factor directly linked to the way of being and doing of the Organization, which must be shared by all its members. This translates into a set of singular facts perceived internally and externally, which differentiate one Company from another and serve, on the one hand, to coalesce it internally and, on the other, to position it in the environment.
The organizational culture contributes greatly to defining the personality of the Organization and, in turn, personality is one of the drivers that concur in the definition of strategic positioning.
Positioning and perceptions
The positioning of a Company, and ultimately its brand, seek identification and differentiation with respect to the competition. The essence of that difference translates into certain behavior patterns throughout the Organization. This is something that reflects the corporate culture and that reaches the customer, before, during and after each commercial transaction. For that reason, today more than ever, brands need to build dialogues with citizens.
It is necessary to consider that the Companies can be valued in economic terms by their shareholders, but citizens value them based on their perceptions constructed by the ideals that they transmit and by the set of their interactions with them, either at a corporate level or transferred to their products or services.
These perceptions translate into what shapes the reality of the brand, which identifies the difference between what it believes it is and what it really is, based on what the citizens think.
It is clear that while the functional or material aspects of any product or service are easily copied, the knowledge, experience, and talent of the people who make up the Organization are much more difficult to copy. The behaviors developed by a Company, as a result of its personality, its competences and its capabilities, configure in itself an extension of the strategic positioning adopted by them or transferred to their brands.
Corporate Culture Management
Mismanagement of the corporate culture can have serious consequences, in addition to jeopardizing the cohesion of positioning. Let us think that it is a fantastic tool to build commitment, agree on management philosophy, motivate staff and facilitate socialization. If internal messages about beliefs are not clear or misunderstood by employees, then the Company’s positioning will also be confusing and misunderstood by customers.
Strategic positioning is inevitably linked to culture, which emanates from values and purpose. Consequently, you should be able to evolve to reflect any changes that affect your environment, although this is not as simple as we saw here. There is, therefore, a great paradox: it is difficult to change the culture of an organization, while the flexibility and speed of adaptation to new environments are essential for the survival of any Company.
To manage this change it will be necessary:
1- Identify what kind of culture the organization needs
2- Measure the existing culture to identify the gaps between the current and the desired
3- Decide how to close those gaps and repeat the process periodically.
Culture is learned, shared and transmitted. The client may not be aware of the corporate or brand strategy, but surely he will be aware of the behaviors derived from it. This is how positioning directly reaches the mind of the client; seasoned perhaps by the inputs it receives through communication, which is a means and not a tool in itself for the construction of a positioning.
Branding is a discipline that, aligned with the business strategy, must support all the strategies and tactics of the entire organization. For nothing, it should be considered as the end of a process. Positioning, as the basis of any brand-building strategy, must consider the tangible and intangible strengths of the brand and, in them, culture is a reflection of its essential values and attitudes.
Get to know more about how to build an unbreakable brand culture marketing. We, at Internal Branding, are willing to listen to your internal branding needs and offer powerful solutions for your brand growth. Drive your business forward today, email us at jerome@jeromejoseph.com or call (65) 6288 7812.
