Alexander Koene

insights

21-04-2026

Article: Three silos, one system: why we refuse to fit in one box

Strategy, culture and brand expression belong together as one system. With recent science, Gallup 2026 and the BR-ND People vision as a Creative Change Agency.

Three silos, one system: why we refuse to fit in one box

The wrapper is out. The core is in. Strategy, culture and brand belong together as one system: one table, one story, one organisation. Anything less is a problem no campaign can fix.
At a glance:
  • An integrated approach treats organisational strategy, culture and brand expression as one system rather than three separate disciplines.
  • Organisational silos drag measurably on profitability and collaboration. Harvard Business Review (2025) traces 67% of all collaboration failures straight back to silo behaviour.
  • Worldwide, only 20% of employees are engaged at work. In the Netherlands, the figure is 14% (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026).
  • The most brand-led companies are nearly twice as profitable as the least brand-led (Gromark & Melin, Journal of Brand Management 2011).
  • Which is why BR-ND People works as a Creative Change Agency: strategy, culture and brand handled as one practice, not three.

There was a time when branding amounted to a shiny wrapper: a sharp suit, a clever campaign, a promise that never had to survive contact with reality. That time has gone. Today the work sits in the relationship between organisational strategy, organisational culture and brand expression. The world looks straight through the façade: through LinkedIn, through Glassdoor, through customers who can read the mood of your onboarding in three clicks, and through AI that holds every polished claim up against the evidence in seconds.

And still, plenty of organisations preach joined-up thinking on the outside while running things internally like three departments that meet, on a good day, at the steering committee. Strategy in one room, culture in another, brand down the corridor. Three stories, one customer, no coherence.

This piece sets out why an integrated approach to strategy, culture and brand has stopped being optional. With numbers, with recent research, and with the stubborn belief that we can do considerably better than this.

The anatomy of the silo

An organisational silo is a department, function or team that keeps information, decisions and resources walled off from the rest of the organisation. Specialisation, in fairness, is meant to be efficient. Specialisation behind closed doors is something else entirely. Not a hunch. A stack of research.

A flavour of what the past few years have put on the table:

  • Harvard Business Review (2025) identifies three flavours of silo (systemic, elitist and protectionist) and notes that 67% of all collaboration failures trace straight back to silo behaviour.
  • Al Rahahleh, Altawili and Al Bassam (2023), writing in Global Business Review, showed that silo effects don't merely irritate; they leak measurably into lower profitability.
  • Laco, Briones and Baldovino (2024) demonstrated, in a fresh field study, that cross-functional integration through collaboration, coordination and communication lifts performance at every level.
  • De Waal, Weaver, Day and Van der Heijden (2019) went so far as to call silo mentality "the greatest threat to organizational performance", and pinned down five factors that decide whether the walls come down or stay put.
  • Jackson (2021) and the older classics sing the same tune. It isn't a popular song in every boardroom. The data is awkwardly consistent.

It also shows up in the books. A run of B2B alignment studies puts the cost of a creaky relationship between sales and marketing at 10% to 15% of annual revenue, lost to duplicated work, missed leads and the kind of internal politics nobody mentions on a CV. The spreadsheets balanced. The people didn't. And that, sooner or later, leaks out into the world whether you fancy it or not.

Culture isn't a vibe

Organisational culture is the shared set of values, beliefs and unspoken assumptions that shapes how people inside an organisation think, work and decide. Culture isn't a vibe. It's the undercurrent that decides who instinctively speaks up, who instinctively keeps quiet, and which way the energy runs the moment something goes sideways. Edgar Schein set this out back in the 1980s with three layers:

  • Artefacts: the visible. Logo, office, the mug they hand you on day one.
  • Espoused values: what you put on the website and say in the keynote.
  • Basic assumptions: what people simply know to be true, without anyone ever spelling it out.

Fiddle only with layer one and you produce exactly what the last thirty years have produced rather a lot of: a smart logo on a wonky organisation. Which is why Vision, Culture and Image (Hatch & Schultz's VCI model) line up neatly for brands that genuinely hold together, and creak audibly for brands that don't.

This is the favourite mishap of many a boardroom: leadership rolls out a new brand identity from the top, while the culture underneath is thinking, feeling and behaving in an entirely different direction. The keynote lands. The visuals go live. The organisation hasn't budged an inch. Working integrally means listening to the undercurrent first, and only then sending the story out into the world.

Engaged employees and the brand: one chain

The Service Profit Chain (Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger, Harvard Business School) did something many executives would rather not have heard. It proved that employee engagement, customer loyalty and profit form a single chain. Snip a link and the chain breaks. Try it for yourself; it really is as unforgiving as it sounds.

What is Gallup saying in 2026?

  • Worldwide, only 20% of employees are genuinely engaged at work. The lowest level since 2020.
  • In Europe that drops to 12%. Sixth year running at the bottom of the table. Take a bow.
  • In the Netherlands the figure is 14%, which means roughly 86% of your colleagues are not, shall we say, sprinting towards the keyboard of a morning.
  • The global economy leaves $10 trillion in productivity on the floor. Every year.

A peer-reviewed multi-source study across 93 companies bridges this neatly to the brand. Companies with a serious employer branding orientation create what researchers fondly call a "positive affective climate": the pleasant, contagious energy of people who actually believe in what they're doing. Customers feel it. Candidates feel it. The quarterly numbers feel it too.

Brand as a profit lever, not a marketing line item

For those who prefer to think in pounds and euros: Gromark and Melin tracked the 500 largest companies in Sweden and found something inconveniently undeniable. The most brand-led companies were nearly twice as profitable as the least brand-led. Not a touch more. Not with a footnote. Almost double. And their definition of brand orientation isn't a brand book; it's inside-out, with the brand as the beating heart of the entire organisation.

Further research across 135 organisations makes a similar point: "doing HR properly" is not the same thing as "deploying people strategically". It's the strategic deployment (read: culture) that flows measurably through to performance. An average HR handbook isn't going to get you anywhere near it.

And then there's Byron Sharp, who tips over every table the moment someone mentions "purpose". His point, put plainly: growth comes mostly from physical and mental availability; from distribution, from recognisable codes, from people being able to buy you in the first place. Fair point, well made. We read it as both/and, not either/or. A brand that's only visible is forgotten the minute an alternative shows up. A brand that's only meaningful never makes it onto the shelf. Working integrally means sharpening both at once: meaning on the inside, availability on the outside.

The methodology of happiness: 23plusone

At BR-ND People we gave this integrated view a handle in the 23plusone method. It wasn't dreamt up on a Post-it. It came out of quantitative research across more than 8,000 respondents who together profiled 195 brands, and it's been repeated several times since for good measure. The finding: the better a brand plugs into the 24 fundamental human drivers (from loyalty and status to creativity and care), the greater its pull.

It becomes properly interesting when you put your employees' drivers next to your customers'. Tune them to the same frequency and they sing in harmony. Leave them on different channels and what you mostly hear is static, however expensive the campaign was. Branding stops being a department and becomes a tuning.

Why we're a Creative Change Agency (and not a branding agency)

A Creative Change Agency treats brand strategy, organisational culture and brand expression as one integrated system, rather than slicing them up into separate disciplines as traditional branding agencies, strategy consultancies or HR consultancies tend to do. A logo changes an organisation about as much as a new coat changes your character. And yet a great many people still work daily as if it does. That's precisely why BR-ND People doesn't call itself a branding agency, but a Creative Change Agency. Not a semantic flourish; a deliberate choice with consequences.

A branding agency, by definition, works on the outside: positioning, identity, campaign, delivery, invoice. In an era where every employee has a microphone on LinkedIn, where a customer can see straight through your HR policy in three clicks, and where AI checks every polished promise against reality in seconds, that position is, frankly, no longer tenable. The outside is no longer sold separately. Hand over the coat on its own and the cold wind keeps right on blowing.

Creative Change Agency is our way of making the brief big enough to do justice to what a brand actually demands today.

  • Creative stands for the imagination and storytelling that move people. Spreadsheets rarely persuade and never stir.
  • Change stands for the invisible work underneath: strategic clarity, behavioural change, culture work, brave leadership. Not a rebrand, but a re-engineering of what the brand is asked to carry.
  • Agency stands for the fact that we get stuck in. We aren't advisors who hand over a report and slip out before the kettle boils. We stay until the thing actually resembles something. That's how we work with our clients.

The label does occasionally make us harder to place at networking drinks ("so do you do the logo or not?"). The answer is yes, and at the same time something a logo is, at best, the cherry on top of. Building a brand today means building an organisation. Building an organisation is, by definition, both creative and change work. This isn't a category rebrand; it's a more honest definition of what branding ought to have been all along.

Building a brand today is building an organisation.

In closing: the core is the only capital

The wrapper has had its moment. Organisations that treat strategy, culture and brand as one system are more productive, more profitable and far better prepared for the brisk wind of 2026: transparency, AI verification, sceptical employees, impatient customers. What happens when AI starts doing the agency work itself, we covered separately in can AI replace a branding agency?.

The rest can carry on wrapping nicely. We'd rather peel through to the core. Fancy doing the same? Here's how we work. Pop the kettle on.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Creative Change Agency?

A Creative Change Agency pairs imagination (creative) with behavioural change and organisational development (change), and turns up as a partner who builds alongside you. Not as an advisor who drops off a report and catches the train home. BR-ND People uses the label because a brand today simply can't be neatly separated from culture and strategy. They're one organism.

Why is an integrated approach to strategy, culture and brand more effective than separate silos?

Recent research (De Waal et al. 2019; Jackson 2021; Laco et al. 2024; Harvard Business Review 2025) shows that organisational silos can cost up to 15% of annual revenue, dent profitability and stall renewal. Brand orientation paired with a strong culture, according to Gromark and Melin (2011), produces nearly double the profitability. Not a rounding error: very nearly twice.

What is the difference between BR-ND People and a traditional branding agency?

A branding agency works mainly on the outside: logo, identity, campaign, invoice. BR-ND People works on strategic clarity, culture development and brand expression at the same time, because with LinkedIn, Glassdoor and AI verification in play, the outside simply isn't sold separately anymore.

What is the 23plusone method?

23plusone is BR-ND People's drivers methodology, built on quantitative research across more than 8,000 respondents and 195 brands (and repeated since, because one study never quite settles an argument). It maps 24 fundamental human drivers and is used to bring brand, culture and strategy onto the same frequency. Read more in the full article 23plusone: emotive dynamics & brand research that measures what really moves people.

Which scientific sources support this integrated approach?

The main evidence comes from Schein (organisational culture), Hatch & Schultz (VCI model), Heskett et al. (Service Profit Chain), Gromark & Melin (brand orientation and profitability), Gallup (engagement) and recent silo studies by De Waal et al., Jackson, Laco et al., Al Rahahleh et al. and Jones et al. The full list is below.

Client stories: strategy, culture and brand in practice

Organisations we've guided through the integrated approach to strategy, culture and brand:

Further reading: Translating core values into concrete behaviour · 23plusone method: emotive dynamics & brand research · Under mother's umbrella: the academic foundation for brand portfolio strategy · How we work.

Key sources