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Branding and culture are two separated dimensions often run by separated teams. This is problematic because many companies do not realise that branding and culture are part of the same process. So why are branding and culture part of the same process?

In most organisations branding is driven by the marketing department whereas cultural projects are driven by the People (HR) department. Often these two continuous projects (and participants) communicate little or not at all with one another, and that is because they are perceived as separate projects. This goes against our vision of what branding and culture is and how they can reinforce each other. We believe that a brand is determined by culture and that the correct display of a brand will reinforce internal culture. In this blog I will assess the two topics and show you how they intertwine.

Branding

Branding is an integral part of marketing. Branding is a way to steer how the outside world perceives your company and how they interact with your company. Brands can be very personal, very classy, very edgy, very transformative, you name it - and it is out there. The flavours of different brands are endless, which is not surprising as each company is trying to stick out from the crowd by creating their own unique identity. That is why it is not surprising that marketing departments focus on creating an own “brand identity” complete with own colours, values, story lines, slogans, and other components to make an own distinctive brand.

While creating a distinctive brand is important, it is almost similarly important to communicate this brand to the outside world. You can have a beautiful brand identity, but if nobody knows about it, then it is practically useless. In other words, you need to make consumers/potential clients aware of your brand. This part of marketing is, not surprisingly, called “brand awareness” which basically focusses on all the different channels through which you are trying to inform the world out there about your brand identity.

As you can imagine, these are enormous tasks, not only to define a strong brand which really stands out and persuades consumers/potential clients, but also to then get your message out there. It is up to your marketing department to properly formulate and distribute the message that your brand wants to convey.

Culture

Turning now to culture. In its core, culture is the combination of all individual values and behaviours of the people within your company. This is in part influenced by your organisational values, but also by individual beliefs. Culture is therefore not something that you can completely control, you can only partly steer it. With every new person that joins your team, or every person that leaves your team, your culture partly changes. So, in some sense culture is something you cannot control. However, you can stimulate certain behaviours and demotivate others. This way you can move culture in the right direction.

Your culture determines a lot on how your employees communicate and behave internally, but also how they communicate and behave towards the outside world. In part, your culture therefore determines what how the outside world perceives your company and your brand. This hints towards how culture and branding are very intertwined.

The same coin

So how are culture and branding part of the same process? Well, in simple terms branding is a process which determines how you are perceived in the outside world and culture determines how your employees interact with the outside world. In essence they are therefore both part of the same process: interactions with the outside world.

An organisation is its people. I believe that branding should start with assessing your internal culture. You need to know first what your internal culture stands for before you can create a brand accordingly. Why? Simple: consistency. For example: you can create a beautiful brand identity talking about how customer-focussed your organisation is, but let’s assume that your employees are rather more focussed on creating the best products (product-focussed). If your customer interacts with your representatives, which have a different attitude than your brand advertises, this might disappoint or upset them, or even worse; it will make your brand identity questionable, unconvincing, or even unbelievable.

On the flip side, having a brand identity which does not align with the internal culture also causes some problems. You will soon find that your employees do not believe any more about the message you convey to your customers/clients and that they become unhappy about the fact that the company seems to become more and more out of touch with their own employees and the internal culture. This can lead to unhappiness, unproductivity and even with people calling in sick or ultimately leaving the company.

So, what to do?

1. Find out what your culture is.

As with all cultural projects, the first step of assessing your current culture is key. Try to use employee surveys to question your employees what they value in their work, how they feel connected to their colleagues and what motivates them to come to work. Ask them how they communicate towards one-another, if they feel free to speak up during meetings, if they value creativity, how they experience the leadership; and many other questions. Try to find out how they work (together) and what motivates them to work (together).

(optional) 2. Motivate desired behaviours/demotivate undesired behaviours

In case you notice that there are many unwanted behaviours, then you should try and motivate desired behaviours and demotivate undesired behaviours. Use workshops, brainstorming sessions and early adopters to help people see how individual and group behaviour affect the brand in a positive (or negative) way. Bring out their desire to build a strong unique culture and brand. During these sessions you should get a better uniform image of what behaviours everybody wants to motivate. This is also the moment to take the leading role and move people in the right direction to start adopting the desired behaviours.

From these sessions you should also be able to bring organisational values to life. Working bottom-up: individual behaviours can be generalized in a couple of shared attitudes, which in turn can be generalized and highlighted in organizational values.

Don’t forget that organisational values prescribe behaviours. These are things you do. Therefore, your organizational values should be actionable.

3. Create a brand identity that aligns with your culture and promote it.

Now that you have found out what your internal culture stands for, it is time to create a brand identity around it. This is the job of your marketing department, but they need to keep connecting their messaging with the internal culture. If that does not align, then you are saying one thing while doing another. Once your brand identity is established and aligned with your internal culture, feel free to promote it any way you see fit.

4. Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate!

I do not understand why companies keep forgetting this step. Once you have created the right culture, the right brand identity, and you have started promoting it, then celebrate this with everybody involved! Present the results, show of the new polished brand, and how you are promoting it towards the outside world. While you are presenting this to your employees, remind them of how essential their contribution was into the cultural assessment and how they too have created their brand. It is just as much their achievement as it is the achievement of your marketing department. After all, your brand is your company, and your company is your brand. Everyone contributes to that, so every individual is key. Make your employees feel part of this journey and make them feel that they have contributed to this process. This will improve your overall culture, internal atmosphere, and connectivity amongst your employees.

In conclusion

Branding and culture are part of the same process. Culture is an integral part of branding, and you cannot create a solid brand without understanding your culture first. Therefore, I would argue that every brand project should align itself with the internal culture. If your brand does not align with your culture, then it becomes unconvincing and uncredible in the long run. Do you want to change your brand? Or do you want to fine-tune your brand identity? Start looking towards your internal culture and you will find your guidance towards how to change your brand and the overall perception of your company for the better.

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AI is a broad term of all forms of demonstrated intelligence by machines. It encapsulates everything from simple customer-service queries to sophisticated deep learning networks. It has been around since the 1940’s and has become a real hype in the last ten to twenty years. The problem with AI is, is that it is something like the internet in the 1980’s: everybody is talking about it, little people actually know what they are talking about, and even less people are getting business value out of it. Today we find AI in: self-driving cars, chat-bots answering questions, email spam filters and more. In this blog I will try and make an attempt to belong to the second category and show you where AI stands right now in HR and where I believe it will go to.  

Firstly, let’s start off with a quick note for sceptics towards AI and their idea that robots will take over the world, as Hollywood shows us in movies like ‘I, Robot’, ‘Terminator’, and ‘The Matrix’. Experts themselves have no idea when we can achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), as in the movie robots, and are guessing somewhere near the end of this century or even after that. Furthermore, they argue that it is simply impossible for us to create beings which think like us because of one simple reason: we know very little our own brain. In other words; we almost know nothing about our brains, let alone reproducing them. Now that’s out of the way, let’s see where we are today in HR.  

Where we are today

Today AI is being used within HR on a limited scale, let’s start of by looking at recruitment. There are already algorithms who help recruiters source the right candidates and there are also applications which can scan resumes and search for certain key words and sentences indicating that he or she has the right profile. Another feature of AI which is currently being used is in the first stages of contact with a candidate. You can think of automated messaging, scheduling interviews, providing ongoing feedback about the recruitment process and answering their questions in a chat function. The main idea behind these simple tasks is to reduce bias and save recruiters time which they can spend on more important tasks, such as: assessing cultural fit, holding technical interviews and finding qualified referrals.  

AI is also being used within HR as a chatbot for general HR-related inquiries (such as Una from Unilever). These bots function as first-line HR support for all your employees. Another interesting development is the use of VR (Virtual Reality) within HR. It is being used to simulate real-life scenarios and test, measure and improve behaviour. VR is and will be an integral part of training for real-life situations and how your employees will handle them. The idea behind these developments is to, yet again, relieve your HR employees from simple tasks, assignments, and recorded training sessions and let them focus on the harder tasks, such as talent development and culture building.

Finally, there are also early signs of applications which analyse the data and computer activity of employees to predict who is thinking about leaving the company and when. The idea behind it is that with big data analysis you can see which digital office behaviour indicates that somebody is thinking about quitting the company. This will allow your HR employees to take up contact with the individual to see if there is anything that can be done to change the individuals mind or if you need to think about a mutual agreement on ending the employment and start looking for a replacement. In this sense it is important because these early signs can let you be ahead of the curve so you can have a smooth transition from one employee leaving and a new one taking his or her place.  

Want to find more on where AI stands in HR today? Have a look at this article from the HR Exchange Network.  

Where we will go in the future

In the short term the abovementioned methods will become more sophisticated. So automated sourcing, resume scanning, messaging, chatbots, VR training and employee data analysis will be able to direct you towards more specific answers. We all know the frustration of a chatbot which just keeps you sending to the same general page on the topic from the FAQ, while the info you really need is somewhere else. Just as anything in real life, that on its own will take time. The AI will need time learning from the input that we give it.  

More interestingly, I believe that AI will also have a place in face-to-face contact with the first interviews. I think that companies like Future Robotics will also introduce their life-like customer service robots in the realm of HR. This can be via a digital setup or even in person. The robot will deal with the basic questions which get asked in a first interview. Algorithms will then analyse the answers given to see which candidate made the best first impression. Additionally, I also think that VR sessions can be used to test candidates on their capabilities into handling different situations. The upside here is that it takes out all personal bias from a recruiter’s perspective towards the candidate.  

Another thing that AI will bring HR is new jobs. Up until now I have only described AI as a possibility of downsizing activities and how it might replace jobs in the future. On the other hand, it opens up opportunities for HR to be a real tool to increase the productivity of your company. The future of HR will be more focussed towards behaviour, culture, ethics and values and how these can be pointed in the direction which makes sense for your business. Those areas of focus are, not unimportantly, also the main reasons of motivation on how you motivate somebody to JOIN and STAY in your company, so therefore it should be the main focus of your HR department.  

Want to find out more about present and upcoming trends of AI in HR? Have a look at this article from Forbes.  

In conclusion

For now, I am not ready to board the hype train about scientific robots who think and act like humans. I do think however that AI will clear up routine tasks for us which will leave us in HR time to deal with more important issues, such as creating the right culture, stimulating and describing right behaviour and increasing productivity. Do you not want to wait ten to twenty years until AI clears up your HR department’s time for these issues? Contact us and see how we can help you to develop the right culture, motivate right behaviour and increase productivity.

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When we think about culture, we think about HR departments who coordinate culture related projects and value determining group activities. However, culture adds more value than it is often credited for, also for the marketing department.

Let’s say you believe that there is some value in culture, but that it is not that important for your company. Let’s even say that you do not care about internal atmosphere or how productive your employees are. Let’s even go so far to say that you believe that, as long as everybody just does their job, there is no need to really worry about culture. Even then, even if you do not care about these internal factors, then there is another reason why you should worry about your culture: it directly affects your branding as a company, and could either be beneficial or detrimental.

Wait, what?

Yes, you’ve read it correctly. Culture, an internal challenge, will determined how you will be perceived externally. Let’s do a thought exercise. Think about a random company you’ve ever been in touch with. How did you perceive your interaction with that company? Positive? Negative? And what shaped that interaction? Was it the designed marketing message on their website? Their advertisements? Or was it the interaction with their customer service-, helpdesk-, or sales representative? More often than not, our opinions of companies are shaped with how we interacted with individual employees. How those respective individuals interacted with us is heavily dependent on how the internal culture and values are set up. For example, a company whose culture is shaped around serving customers will most likely have employees who are more pleasant to interact with, as consumer, as opposed to a company whose culture is shaped around following rules. This is, in a nutshell, why culture also matters for your branding.

But how does this work in practice? How can you set it up and what do you need to do to improve your branding?

The foundation

In core culture is a mixture of individual behaviours and values. These behaviours and values get translated into how people act and the sum of all these actions is what we call culture: how people behave and interact with each other. It seems therefore that culture is pretty much determined and that there is little that you can change. This is partly true; you cannot fully control culture and it sometimes grows organically. However, good behaviours and values can be stimulated and bad behaviours and values can be discouraged. So, you cannot steer culture as much, but you can nudge it in the right direction (Do you want to read more about the power of nudging? Read this article). This means that you can mould your culture towards the desired internal driver which aligns with your external message. For example, the marketing message: “we are service champions” should align with the internal value “being service minded”. Easy right? Wrong. Adjusting culture is hard. It is a time-consuming process and the people involved are often stubborn and hard to convince.

Turning the idea upside down, you can also see how internal culture will affect your marketing message. If you have toxic values within your culture, this will also translate in how your image will be conducted outwards. For example, if rules come first and customers always come second, then your customers will notice this when they interact with the people within your company. So, although culture and marketing seem worlds apart from each other, they are actually closely related and interconnected.

If you still believe that this is all ridiculous, then think back about the thought exercise. Think about how your perception was shaped, who was involved and what they did. You can deduct their actions back to motivations which are shaped by behaviours and values. That is culture.

Getting it right

What happens when your culture is actually aligned with your marketing message? Well when culture and marketing interlock and supplement each other, that is when you utilize culture to its fullest extent. The result is often noticeable in increased customer satisfaction. Depending on your culture, marketing and goals, it can either: drive sales and/or improve service and/or expand operations and much more. Culture can motivate your employees to go above and beyond and to reach goals which seem unachievable. As your employees feel part of something that is bigger than themselves and the message that your brand displays, they can create something bigger than just the sum of their efforts. Does this still sound a bit vague and fuzzy? Forbes has ranked 50 companies with a great culture (read more here). What do we see? In the top 4 there are 3 companies (Microsoft, Zoom & Google) which are extremely successful in their industry. This is, in large respect, thanks to their outstanding culture which motivates their employees in a positive way. Their stimulating culture increases collaboration, customer satisfaction, service, but most importantly: the growth of the company they are working for.  

In conclusion

So where do we stand? Well, firstly it is important to repeat the mantra: culture eats strategy for breakfast. The importance of culture cannot be overstated enough, not only for your internal atmosphere but also for your external brand. HR herein has to play a more central and steering role within a company and not just “that office where they do the administration and stuff”. CEO’s and directors have to be made aware of this as they need to give HR a more central role. You see that this already happened at companies with a thriving culture. Now how to set it up is more difficult to explain, mainly because it is entirely dependent on the situation and environment of your company.

If you want more information on how to unlock the power of culture for your company, then get in touch with us and see what we can do for you!

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