Oh Lord, won’t you find me a culturally significant brand
More than ever it’s important for brands to harness cultural insight not only to build strong consumer-facing strategies, but also to win the talent war. Daniel Bluzer-Fry explains why.
I’m sure many of us have noticed plenty of articles and discussion in recent times about the numerous challenges that exist today when it comes to attracting and retaining great talent.
Most articles I’ve read of late have taken a millennial skew, with some of the key strategies for engagement including clear and transparent dialogue between senior management and staff, clear pathways and opportunities for growth along with strong mentorship/coaching (amongst other things).
Indeed, creating a winning organisational culture is often a theme at the centre of many of these articles, something that I feel was most poignantly articulated by Didier Elzinga – the CEO and co-founder of Culture Amp, an Aussie tech start-up specialising in using data and analytics to improve company culture – who notes that “culture is the only competitive advantage”.
But I always find reading these articles interesting given most of them are penned by HR practitioners, and as a marketer, the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about ‘culture’ is how brands build value by forging meaningful connections within the world we inhabit not as purely ‘consumers’, but as people.
Patagonia
Dharma Bums
Outerknown
Tesla
Great article!
Many gov. and not-for-profits tend to do this with their values identified along with the vision and mission statements and disseminated through the organization (internally and ex). For profits tend to be less altruistic, though most will still operate off a triple bottom line strategy, albeit with one of the line’s importance outweighing the others. Maybe brands should be the cornerstone of this?
I think the wave of simpler-designed disruptive business models will help brands find their identity more naturally. Not always the case though and strengths and values will always need to be identified and worked on.
Apple focuses on fostering creativity. They have long been the disrupters in mobile. The first to make a screen scroll, the first proper app store, the first to with two cameras on the back, earphone buds, and now with iOS10, really innovative communication tools and an emoticon market place. I think the iPhone7 has revitalized their standing as leaders in Mobile and creativity, especially when Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones are exploding in their users hands. Up until now though, they have surely been losing ground.
“Whilst there’s a raft of postmodern theorists who would suggest that work plays a significantly lesser role in how we construct our identities today than in previous epochs[3], the reality is that a substantial part of how we derive our identity today still comes through one of our major preoccupations … our work.”
This is a stupid sentence. What’s the point of quoting postmodern theory then you’re going to ignore it completely?
You know what I ask the Lord for? A ‘Brand Strategist’ who can talk about brands with reverting automatically to Apple. It’s lazy. Don’t be lazy.
” …one of my strongest memories about how companies can perceive opportunities in this space came when doing a debrief with a cross-functional team from a strong Australian brand many years ago. Upon digesting the presentation that had just been delivered – and realising the brand’s capacity to live beyond any simple product category and influence culture to build lasting equity …”
I’d be curious to know which brand this was, as I believe you have things entirely back to front. Good products build strong brands, not the other way around.
Sometimes you can apply specific parts of the brand equity built in one category into adjacent product categories. But stretch the brand too far from its origins and it inevitably fails as its perceived expertise and authority – i.e. those things that built it in the first place – become less relevant and less credible.
Apple may well make its own car. We’ll see. Meanwhile, would you buy a smartphone made by Toyota? Or Cadbury’s? What about a shampoo from Google? Other than abstract notions of ‘quality’ or ‘innovation’, what expertise do these brands bring to the party?
Nobody is good at everything. Name one successful brand that is not in some way category-specific …
(Virgin? Yes, they’re in lots of unrelated categories, but fail to achieve a dominant share in any of them. It depends on your definition of ‘successful’, I suppose).