Today’s Tip
Best Practice: In creating a brand, look at brand personality and company culture: vision, values, practices, people, content and place.
Today’s Article: Six Tips to Creating a Brand Personality and Company Culture
In creating a brand personality, it needs to match or compliment your business culture. This is even more important today with social media and transparency. Pick the vision, values, practices, people, content and place that will work best for your brand.
Create a brand personality and culture that helps your business thrive. Doing things right from the beginning will save having to correct undesirable decisions, behaviors or asking employees to change their attitudes at a later date.
There are six common building blocks to creating a brand personality and company culture: vision, values, practices, people, content, and place.
1. Vision: A great brand personality and company culture starts with a vision or mission statement. Good vision statements help connect internal customers (employees) and external customers, suppliers and stakeholders. A vision statement and the company tagline need to be connected with a consistent transparent simple, but powerful message. Keep it to 140 characters just like a Twitter message.
Examples: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Amazon.com “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online.” Zappos.com, also referred to by Zappos employees as their “WOW Philosophy,” is “To provide the best customer service possible.”
2. Values: While a vision articulates a company’s purpose, values offer a set of guidelines on the behaviors and mindsets needed to achieve that vision.
Example: Mission and values need to be connected and transparent.
Zappos Mission: “To provide the best customer service possible.”
Zappos Family Core Values to which everyone in the company contributes on a yearly basis:
1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble
3. Practices: If a brand is only as strong as its weakest link. Look at the flow within your organization and look at each step or practice in the process of delivering your product or service. To deliver on your brand, mission and values make sure that each company practice lives up to those ideals. Practices are to be re-evaluated each year to prevent brand drift and keep current with changes in the world.
4. People: The people who work for your company daily deliver on the mission, values and make things happen through practices. Only hire and affiliate with people and organizations that support your brand, share your values and enjoy implementing company practices. The result will be a stronger brand, greater productivity, lower employee turnover and higher profits.
5. Content: What is content? Content is relevant and timely information that goes out to internal and external customers to promote the brand and run the company. The content can be presented in a variety of ways: advertising, case studies, e-books, emails, employee events, how-to-guides, infographics, newsletters, phone calls, PR, social media, trade shows, video, website, white papers, etc.
6. Place: When building your brand personality and company culture, look at a sense of place and design it to shape and support the brand. Place can be internal and external environment qualities.
Does your brand connect more with a particular type of geography or location? Example: “L.L.Bean, Inc. has been a trusted source for quality apparel, reliable outdoor equipment and expert advice for over 100 years. Our company headquarters are in Freeport, Maine.”
Internally how are you setting up your company office space? Google “We found that they need a lot of diversity. There are so many ways to work—as a team, solo—and so many kinds of workers, from introverts to extroverts and so on. We create many different places so people can be as productive as possible—from formal and informal conference rooms to open spaces to stretching and yoga areas and gyms.”
The place where customers connect with you, make sure it matches the brand, vision, values and practices whether it is a website, store front, or a social media platform. Be consistent. Be transparent.
Action Step: Describe your desired brand personality and company culture.
Vision:
Values:
Practices:
Type of People You Hire:
Focus of Content:
Place:
Additional Resources
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