Culture eats brand strategy

They say culture eats strategy for lunch, but does culture eat your brand as well – maybe as a little snack or side dish to your business strategy? Many agencies focus only on the mere execution of branding or rebranding campaigns and while they might include internal communication and stakeholder management as a part of their research process, little energy is put into actually figuring out what the brand culture is, right now as people live it, in their client’s organizational culture.

Focusing only on the execution and awareness effects of a branding campaign does not add anything to the cultural aspects of your organization and can, in worst cases, be unaligned and damage your corporate brand. Before throwing yourself at a big, costly branding initiative, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions:

What are the specific values that dominate the organizational culture and how are they lived?

How can you build on that, take advantage from it and make the brand stronger with this knowledge!

What is your company culture?

You do not necessary have to generate a huge anthropological study of your organization, but you do need to dig a little