Five Tips for Branding Your Culture

A company’s brand and culture influence each other in powerful ways. It serves you well to understand the impact of culture on the branding process, as your culture shapes your brand and reflects your culture. So how do you leverage your internal culture for an external payoff?

Culture is the core of any business. It encapsulates what you stand for and believes in your values, how you treat and nurture people, your business style, and how you behave when no one’s looking. Your culture manifests itself everywhere, in everything, as does your brand. Leveraging these essential truths, and delivering them to consumers, shapes your brand in the minds of your customers.

When you deal with a company whose employees truly embody the values and purpose of the company, you can feel the difference. It translates to a better and more consistent service experience, which builds trust, loyalty, and business. Then think about when you were treated poorly as a customer and how much you want to tell the world. The human interactions that customers experience with your company determine your brand’s reputation. In those critical moments, your brand either strengthens or weakens itself. And that is why culture is so influential.

How Does Your Culture Influence Brand?

Your company’s internal culture has a powerful influence on your brand. Whether you knowingly define and shape your internal culture influences your brand. The perfect brand and culture symbiosis would support the other to create a unified internal-external brand experience where everything you say, act and do align. Success depends on how authentically your culture and brand mirror each other. Consumers are more likely to connect with your brand if they understand what you are about. You fail if all you chalk it up to be is not reinforced by the experience you deliver. Easier said than done, right? Well, it doesn’t have to be.

Start with these five tips for branding your culture:

1. Define your brand.

Who are you? What do you stand for? What is your customer service philosophy? What are your core values? How do you treat customers? What is your reason for being? In a world with endless opportunities to cut corners and compromise values, employees need to see themselves as part of the brand promise your company is marketing. Everyone needs to believe in and feel connected to the brand for the company to deliver on its promise. Everyone needs to have the same understanding of the ideals your brand embodies.

Nick Sarillo is the founder, CEO, and “Primary Keeper” of the Purpose and Operational Values of Nick’s Pizza & Pub – the sixth busiest independent pizza company in per-store sales in the United States. Nick’s provides a unique place for customers to connect with family and friends, have fun, and feel at home. Nick is a model for how a great culture can transform an ordinary business into something extraordinary. This allows them to reduce attrition, provide profit-sharing for every team member, and create a fun, open work environment. When employees are authentic and passionate about their work, it shows. If your employees believe in your brand, they’ll care for your customers. Getting the culture right and building a great brand will fall into place.

2. Create a brand identity that echoes culture and values.

The visual representation of your brand must tell the story of who you are, what you do, and why you matter. Designers are responsible for your brand’s look and feel. Designing your brand identity, brand personality, brand images, and brand elements should be executed by your strategy. When you understand your brand — its mission, vision, values, and reason for being — and bring it to life with design, your audience will see a more authentic reflection of your true self.

3. Hire employees who embody your brand.

Put the right people in place based on a shared vision, purpose, values, and beliefs, not just a skill set. Your employees are your company’s backbone—your brand’s human manifestation. Our client Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, NY, is a pioneer in social enterprise working to impact the world positively. The bakery trains and provides jobs for hard-to-employ individuals in the community to lift them out of poverty, regardless of education, work history, or past social barriers, such as incarceration, homelessness, or drug use. Greyston’s open-door hiring practice is a roadmap to assist individuals and families in visualizing and realizing paths to self-sufficiency. Their spiritually rooted philosophy fuels community development and a commitment to human growth and potential.

This mission permeates everything they do – it makes Greyston the force of socially conscious purpose, personal transformation, and community economic renewal it is today. Here’s how it works: anyone who comes to the bakery’s front door is given a chance to work, no questions asked. When a job becomes available, they take the next person off the waiting list and provide them with an appointment. Once an individual starts at Greyston, they become a part of their apprenticeship program. They are equipped with resources, personal development tools, and training in professional skills to give them the most excellent chance for success in their new job. Over 30 successful years, Greyston’s programs and services have transformed the lives of thousands of residents in Yonkers.

4. Write a manifesto.

Most businesses have a mission and vision statement. The words may be posted on a wall or published on their website, but don’t commit to them. Or, they sound like something you’d read in a press release. Don’t do that. Instead, facilitate a team-building exercise to develop a bold statement of beliefs, thoughts, and principles for the company to embody and all the world to see. Unified in purpose and passion, it will give people a reason to stand behind your brand—making it more compelling, coherent, and rewarding for customers. You might even try involving your team in a Brand Workshop or VisionCamp. Brand Workshops can help you achieve brand clarity and unify your team in one day.

Our client, Text-Em-All, is an automated group messaging service that allows you to automatically send voice or text messages to every phone number on your list. After eight years in business, they wanted to take the brand from commodity to love mark. They wanted a brand that better reflected the people and culture behind Text-Em-All. They wanted their customers to know that they were real people who cared passionately about the work they did. They knew they had something special but had never sat down to define and document it. They needed help articulating the deeper purpose behind their brand and bringing it to life. We worked with them to determine who they are as a company, what makes them different from their competitors, and what message to convey to customers. The result was a fantastic brand manifesto that they refer to for anything from guiding daily decisions to recruiting (and filtering) new employees.

5. Tell a great story.

Brand stories provoke engagement and emotion. Stories are important because they are inherent to the human experience. Through storytelling, we pass on our wisdom, beliefs, and values and explain the world around us and our role and purpose. Audiences have always known this and asked for it—they’ve never asked for content. The UK-based Hiut Denim Company is a company that makes jeans—no bobble caps. No sweatshirts. No mugs. No perfumes. No distractions from the main thing. Jeans are the only thing. Cardigan is a small town in the UK with 4,000 people. They made 35,000 pairs a week for three decades. One day the factory closed, but all that skill and know-how remained. The Hiut Denim Company started bringing jean manufacturing back and bringing new life into their town. “I know a big part of the jeans business is how you tell your story. We will have to tell our story as well as make our jeans. We have a great story: A town that stopped making jeans after 30 years. Then one day, started making them again.” Simple, compelling, and emotional. Don’t you want a pair?

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