Brand culture.
Meaningful impact by the collective.
Brand culture promotes a new way of thinking about branding. The first traces of this concept surfaced during the global financial crisis of 2008. Anno now it is proving to be the best way forward for more and more visionary and future-proof organisations. Culture is the foundation on which a purposeful brand can be built. A strong meaningful union between people, both internal and external, forms the base from which a meaningful brand develops.
In this new way of thinking, be aware that your brand is always represented by real humans, their feelings, beliefs and ideas, and not by means, such as logos and marketing campaigns. Those are mere semantic representations of your brand. Such properties indeed are important for saliency, recognition and confirmation of ideas. With brand culture, it starts with recognising that humans are a social and highly emotive species.
Culture-based brands have the potential to transform companies into business as a force for good.
We are convinced that in modern branding, the organisation's inner drives, values and joint purpose must be fully aligned with brand communications as promises across all internal and external touchpoints. Moreover, developing and strengthening the organisation culture is becoming key to developing attractive brands. To be successful, cooperate with partners, and help solve the challenges the world is facing, brands must be shaped from the inside out. Such brands will need to embrace a cultural shift in their thinking. We believe such culture-based brands have the potential to transform companies into business as a force for good. And ultimately win the hearts and minds of the people.
It requires a rethink on the process how to create culture based brands.
We use the concept of cultural anthropology. All human behaviour is symbolic in nature. Humans are not evolved to be occupied with economic and logic transactions. To the contrary, humans are creatures of feeling and meaning. And through shared meaning, we belong to tribes or even larger social groups. For our survival, we evolved into a highly social species cooperating in larger groups. In those groups people are connected through a common understanding of our environment, what’s the purpose of our tribe, who we are, what we are here for. In such social groups, meaningful habits develop and are mirrored and unique tools and symbols are developed to express and strengthen the bond between people. And to differentiate one group from the other. As such we are giving shape to our individual and group identity.
The same meaning and feelings that attract customers will also attract and keep employees.
The challenge is how to mobilise the motivation and behaviours of all your co-workers. How to unify and get them behind a purpose worthwhile live by? How to make people happy, motivated and creative? How to make them receptive to change, or even better, be the change. A brand culture starts with jointly defining what the brand is all about and why that matters. And you better make it an inspiring affair, otherwise, nobody will bother. We are happy to support you with that.