Level 5 Blog

A car with three wheels or a stool with two legs is about as complete as a list published recently that purports to catalogue the top 10 qualities of world-class brands.

With well-worn nods to such brand nuts and bolts as “differentiation” and “trustworthiness,” the collection, at Branding Strategy Insider, fails to acknowledge the most critical item of all for defining a world-class brand: employees.

How can such a list imagine itself to be anywhere near comprehensive when it doesn’t mention the importance for a brand to guide the behaviour and actions of its most vital players?

Sure, that a brand be relevant, well-known and accessible is important.

Certainly a customer-centric focus is key, given, as the list’s authors point out, that it’s only when the brand knows its customers and their needs well that it can deliver exceptional purchase and usage experience.

And the point around the role a brand’s value plays in consumer perception is well made. “When all of a brand’s functional, emotional, experiential and self-expressive customer benefits are weighed against the cost (money and time) of acquiring and using the brand, its value must be perceived to be good, excellent or superior.” Fair enough.

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So you get that the all-encompassing concept of brand influences, and is influenced by,  the oft-misunderstood intangible of culture (together they are Escher’s Drawing Hands of the business world). But the imperative to overhaul an organization’s culture to align with its brand might seem an imposing task comparable to negotiating the giant icebergs that threaten ocean-bearing oil rigs.

But fear not, gentle sailor.  As we point out in our white paper, “The Story Behind the New Approach to Winning: Where Brand, Business and Culture Intersect,” based on ideas and metaphors developed by John Burdett, founder of Orxestra Inc., and author of Myth, Magic, Mindset: a Template for Organizational Culture Change (2008), just as the oil rigs in the North Atlantic send tugboats ahead to redirect drifting icebergs on a collision course, a corporate culture can be transformed—gently and with lots of forethought.

“Corporate culture is like the iceberg,” says our paper, echoing John again. “It’s simply not possible to change it in a sudden, dramatic way, because beliefs and patterns of behaviour are far too deeply embedded.” Indeed, your staff would probably reject a move to make too abrupt a shift from their familiar, if misdirected, environment, and reject it outright.

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If you were to construct a house, your blueprint would begin with the foundation. It might be one of solid concrete that promises a future of stability and rigid reliability; it might be one of packed earth that promises a future flexible enough to accommodate for seasonal expansion and contraction.  Now replace “foundation” with “culture,” and understand why a company needs to cultivate this grounding essential before committing to a hard-line strategy for conducting its business.

As Level5’s recently published white paper, “The Story Behind the New Approach to Winning: Where Brand, Business and Culture Intersect,” outlines, based in large part on the concepts developed by John Burdett, founder of Orxestra Inc., and author of Myth, Magic, Mindset: a Template for Organizational Culture Change (2008), the relationship between strategy and culture is an important one.  The establishment of the former before the latter is common wisdom—just look at the time, emphasis and money most organizations put toward strategic design versus the culture in which the organization operates—yet we believe that decision is inefficient at its best and, at its worst, utterly ineffective.

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