Brand vs Culture: guess which is the hammer, which the nail

Brand or culture: if we want to make our organizations stronger and more focused where should we allocate attention and resources?

To put it another way, does culture drive brand, or is it the other way around? Or maybe brand and culture are just two different names for the same thing.

“Brand Is Culture, Culture Is Brand” was the title of an HBR article by Bill Taylor few years ago. The same phrase gets tossed about from time to time, but in this case it turned out to be misleading because Taylor didn’t actually mean brand and culture are the same thing. Rather, he defined brand as what Marketing does, and culture as what HR does, and suggested that if would be a good thing if the two worked in partnership.

Fair enough. Except that the strongest corporate brands today are no longer creatures of marketing. They are highly strategic, and not just in the communications sense but in the overall what-are-we-here-for sense.

We can illustrate this by way of Simon Sinek’s  “golden circle”. In the center of his strategic circle is “why” we do things, with “how” in the next layer and “what” in the outermost layer. Sinek’s point was that while many companies start with the what of products and features, successful companies like Apple start with why they do what they do, because that is the deep, sub-rational level where customer decisions are made. Then they work outwards from why, through how, to what. His catchphrase is “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.

Brand is the why layer. It defines purpose in the form of a promise to customers – it articulates why we do what we do. Culture lives in the how layer. It describes how we behave, what we believe and how we deliver on the promise.

Does that mean that brand drives culture?

Yes. If a company is strategically focused on a clearly defined purpose, if it starts with why rather than what, brand is the hammer that drives culture – along with most everything else.

And that’s a good thing, because culture would make a terrible driver.

Think about it. Culture is really just a label we place, after the fact, on a collection of emergent properties. It’s a set of attitudes, customs and behaviors that arise organically out of the way people interact with the company, with each other and with the world around them. Corporate culture is important – Peter Drucker famously quipped that it eats strategy for breakfast – but it’s more of an indicator than an instrument of action. You see it in the rear-view mirror. We can nudge corporate culture in one direction or another but we have no real-time operational control of it going forward.

Brands are different. We build them to a plan and purpose. They’re about where we’re going, not a description of where we’ve been. That’s not to say that we have total control over customers’ final brand perceptions – it can be a rude shock sometimes to discover what customers really think of us. But we should know with some precision what we want those perceptions to be. We should also know that to be successful in guiding customer perceptions we have to align all our employee engagement initiatives, processes, actions and communications accordingly.

So culture is both a means and an effect of brand-building. To the extent that culture can be guided at all, it is guided by the brand. But more than that, a strong culture is proof of a brand’s effectiveness, an indicator that everyone in the organization is pulling in one well-defined and meaningful direction.

If corporate culture is healthy, it’s likely that the brand is in good shape as well. But that doesn’t mean brand and culture are the same thing. If you want to improve both, focus on getting the brand right and ensuring that the brand is activated and operationalized throughout the organization.

Then culture will take care of itself. And if it wants to start the day gobbling down a big bowl of strategy, bon appetit.