Building Culture Through Your Brand
Brand culture is the backbone of every company. Encompassing a company’s values, beliefs, identity, and purpose; a brand culture helps to guide the workplace in their pursuit for excellence. A well defined brand culture is beneficial in the long run by ensuring your business remains unique amongst competitors and provides clients with key insights into why they should choose your brand.
Defining your brand culture is essential in attracting qualified employees and consumers to your business. Most importantly, a brand culture clearly states that the people who run the company know exactly what they are representing. Let’s analyse how building a brand culture can help aid your business in the long run.
The Significance of Brand Culture in Today’s Business World
Fully integrating and aligning your brand and culture produces meaningful, powerful results that affect your whole business.
Denise LeeYohn Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest Companies (2018)
A well-built brand culture not only creates a strong bond between employees and employers, it creates strong bonds with customers. In a competitive landscape, it is important to remain visible and stand out to consumers. A brand culture that satisfies consumers' needs and expectations can build long-term beneficial client relationships building trust and providing them with what they want.
As for employees, when workers perceive that their bosses are concerned about their welfare, employees will entrust their wellbeing to the workplace, boosting morale and lowering turnover rates. Employees around the world have been socialised to feel that companies are more concerned with their bottom line than with their employees. By developing a solid culture, successful businesses remove that barrier.
The Five Steps to Creating a Brand Culture
Here we will discuss a few steps required to create a positive brand culture:
Identify your Brand
Creating a proper brand identity is important in reaching out to consumers. Through a series of stories showcasing what your brand is about and what you can do to help, enforces the core message of your company. The most important visual element of any brand is your logo. As the centerpoint of any business, logos aim to define the brand visually and symbolically. Other important applications include voice, colour and imagery.
Invest in Team Members
People will follow you if you inspire them, if you convince them, or if you care about them.
Dr. Axel Zein at TEDxStuttgart
Create a high-performance culture and one where people love to work at the same time.
The first motivation is your boss
Devote resources to create a strong management culture. Only then can an inspiring working environment be developed. Being an inspiring leader is about giving the correct vision, serving others, offering encouragement, and solving problems. Leave room for open dialogue rather than dismissive remarks such as, “I don’t like this”, which can impact a team's creative capacity. By contributing and collaborating with employees through statements such as, “What if we changed this?” helps to open dialogue, provide guidance and enhance quality-of-work. A better workplace is where people can share ideas, make decisions, enjoy themselves, and engage.
Bring out positive employee experiences
An organisation is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
Louis V. Gerstner, IBM
When employees are given a space to work efficiently and are included in making decisions, the productivity of your company will excel. Employees should be the biggest fans of your company and help create positive interactions with the company and its clients. From the office environment to their tasks at hand, ensure your employees feel seen. In the end, it all depends on how you make them feel.
Everyone loves to feel appreciated and recognised for their accomplishments. Always celebrate their achievements, whether it is an individual or group. Most companies have their own unique ways of celebrating their victories. Whether that be a team lunch, an interesting game such as an education room, game area, or VR station where the employees can have a break and then return to work recharged. Such implementations enhance brand culture and the positive interactions that keep your business running.
Promote health and fitness
When employees are in good health and good mind, they are more productive. The wellness of employees is an integral part of the company. Most companies try to include well-being programs that energise their workforce, reduce absences, and attract talent.
Construct a positive user experience
Contemplate the consumers who you are targeting and work accordingly.
Users differentiate brands based on the values and experiences you exhibit. Share meaningful insights into who you are and what you believe in to attract people who genuinely believe in your brand. Ensure these ‘adopters’ accept the ideology you have put forward and allow them to resonate with your brand. Adopters can then share their experiences with your brand to others, producing indirect marketing for your organisation..
The next step in engaging with customers is through digital avenues such as your website. Create positive interactions by utilising UX. Positive Interactions with users correctly helps to build long-lasting relationships and deliver a quality customer experience. Conduct research and understand what your users want and find ways to implement them into your website.
In short, if you connect with the people’s beliefs, you will be able to connect with people that share your interests and want to purchase your products. Also give them good customer service, because it’s always important to treat your consumers well which will give you long-term consumers as well.
Create a good impact on society
Consumers are always looking for brands that will bring change in society. Thus most brands draw up social good strategies as part of their consumer-facing strategy. Companies that want to reach global customers always choose social causes and even politics to include in their advertisements. Consumers are very practical nowadays and can tell if you are targeting the company's profit directly or not. If you want to implement social impact, mean it and implement it.
Provide quality customer service
The experience you construct for your customers is valuable and important for your brand strategy. Your customers should be fans of your brand, they should influence other customers as well. Satisfied customers give positive feedback about your brand to other brands. Words travel fast within the industry, so keeping quality customer service is important.
How an Effective Brand Culture Boosts Business Performance
When a company’s brand culture is implemented, it operates as an integrated system. A well structured brand culture benefits business by creating long-term consumers to quality internal relationships. If the consumers and employees can understand the brand’s purpose and values, it creates a common sense of purpose which will increase the satisfaction of employees and overall success. Invested and satisfied customers will recommend your brand to others and continue working with you.
Better customer loyalty
An advanced brand culture increases customer loyalty. To gain that loyalty the brand should keep their promises and sustain their values which tol build trust. A strong brand culture will make sure that the company’s values align with the customer’s expectations and that employees will see value in providing such outcomes. This will result in more loyal customers and the referral of your brand to others as well.
Enhance better internal relationships
A strong brand culture positively impacts customers and increases internal relationships as well. A well-defined working environment will have a set of rules which will be followed by everyone equally. This will create unity among employees, improving collaboration, and overall job satisfaction.
Better satisfied employees
The most difficult problem with any company is attracting top talent. For that, a well-defined brand culture will help to attract employees that align with your values and see the benefits of working for you. t. When employees are satisfied with their work atmosphere, they are likely to stay throughout and remain loyal to the company as well. This satisfaction of employees will reduce turnover costs and also build an experienced workforce.
Positive impact on brand reputation
A strong brand culture plays a good role in a company's public image. When employees wholeheartedly embrace a brand's values and uphold its commitments, it significantly enhances the company's reputation. This dedication fosters trust among customers and partners, making the company appear reliable and credible. Consequently, the company's brand value rises, boosting its market success. By consistently sticking to core values and remaining committed to the company's mission, a reputation is built, making the way for sustained growth and prosperity in the long run.
How Planet Media Brings Out Effective Brand Culture
At Planet Media, our brand culture continues to develop through our organisational culture, focusing on providing long-term outcomes and relationships to help clients to reach their goals.
Here are some of the main characteristics of Planet Media’s brand culture:
- Collaboration
- Quality Resources
- Creativity
- Innovation
Collaboration
A collaboration is a work style that is applied in a workplace that helps employees work together to attain a common goal that will benefit both the company and its employees.
Planet Media’s organisational culture includes collaboration where our employees are on track to work more effectively and actively to achieve the desired goals. This helps our organisation in sustaining an efficient workstyle for the long run, improving both employee’s coordination and outcome.
Quality Resources
We are best at giving quality resources for its employees. Quality resources are seen as an important input given by the organisation. This makes employees feel updated and more resourceful
Creativity
This cultural trait encourages the creation of new ideas that help improve the business. Our significant importance to the creativity among employees’ knowledge, skills, and abilities. A creative work environment like this encourages creativity, especially for employees in the creative part.
Innovation
Planet Media focuses on innovation and encouraging continued learning for their employees. Our organisation always checks if there are any updates on the employee's skills and provides a space for upgrading those skills. Doing so enhances the organisation's outcome more productively.
Conclusion
As we can see, constructing and implementing a brand culture is an arduous task. But applying a unique culture for your brand will increase the growth and sustainability of the organisation in the long run. Always deliver exactly what you have promised to customers to build trust in them and retain long term users for your organisation. Companies looking for long-term success in the competitive world of business will execute a strong brand culture. In the end, your brand is your identity and your identity is your brand.
