Have You Got the Right Culture?
Not that long ago, you paid to have your brand created for you. Ad agencies did it on the way to building up buyer demand for the products you made. 
You would most likely not use words such as “culture”, althought the brand building was creating the type of company you would be perceived to be. What the ad men made your product stand for became your brand.
Today is another story. The corporate brand can be quite different from any marketing brand. It is still a product of many people and many events but now company leadership is one of the inputs — a big one.
What leaders bring to a company, the values they communicate and embed in the workforce are known now as the culture of the company.
And as author Debby Millhouse points out in an article in the Fordyce Letter, your culture today is your brand.
It still boils down to the experience that multiple and divers audiences will have from dealing with your company. And with the truly global reach and instant communication of the Internet world, influencing that experience becomes a much bigger challenge than it did 50 years ago.
A positive experience over here in niche A can spread like widlfire to others in that niche. So, unfortunately, can a negative experience.
When we look at brand and culture as synonymous, it becomes apparent that the behaviours of your team become just as, possibly more, significant than the performance and usefulness of your products.
And not just outgoing behaviour towards customers and the general public. Employees fashion a corporate culture every day with brutal, if unintentional, honesty. A high value candidate for a position will be heavily influenced by the “street rep”, or culture, that comes out of his or her research.
Given this potential impact, and the supposition that your culture is your brand, the question you want to ask yourself in the middle of the night is this: is our culture the right one?
Millhouse sets out seven questions that leaders should be asking themselves. Go here to take a look.
About the author:Array via: Your Culture Is Your Brand. Is Yours the Right One?