PERSPECTIVES

Brand culture vs company culture: What’s the difference?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Ask the internet for the difference between brand culture vs company culture and the consensus seems to be that organisational or company culture looks inward, while brand culture focuses on how customers and other stakeholders experience the brand. Frankly, there’s a bit more to it than that.

Company culture brings structure

Company culture tends to focus on the logical, structural and procedural mainstays of how a business works. It provides the framework for how and why people would want to come together and be part of the entity.

Working with the construct

If you think about it, there is nothing natural about the way organisations are structured. Every day, people with different backgrounds, interests, personalities and levels of experience and involvement come together to resolve and deliver on a set of targets that they often had little say in setting. It’s a set-up fraught with tension because it brings together expectations, egos, agendas and more in a confined space.

And so the company culture acts to put boundaries (and incentives) around what will be permitted. It’s characterised by alignment and foundational expectations around how people relate to one another and how they contribute to fulfilment of the company’s goals. Company culture also sets out norms for where formal and informal decision-making takes place, how teams position themselves in relation to others, and what they are expected to do to ensure things operate safely, within regulations and as expected.

Bad things happen without boundaries

All of this is vitally important. Without these rules, expectations and ways of working, business would be unstructured, anarchic and narcissistic. Turpitude may be lucrative, at least in the short term, but it is also self-deceptive, menacing, damaging and ultimately destructive. Gustavo Razzetti draws attention to what happened at places like WeWork, Uber, Theranos and more when the controls loosened and bad inclinations became mindsets and then norms.

That’s why, within our Principled Culture model, the company culture is defined by rational things like: controls and rules; remuneration; structure; leadership (style), decision-making and safety. It includes all the things that the culture uses to establish, monitor and develop an operating framework.

Brand culture channels emotions

By contrast, brand culture focuses on discretion and competitiveness. Its role is to bring the brand, or each brand for those organisations with a portfolio of brands, alive and to deliver on what customers, potential employees and investors expect of the brand.

We’ve defined what a brand culture is here. The immediate and noticeable difference is that a brand culture operates from a distinctive and competitive belief set. It sets itself against rivals and looks to out-perform them through the strategy it works with and the ability of teams, individuals and supply chains to deliver on-brand products, services and experiences. Through doing this well, a brand culture consolidates the position and perception of the brand in the market, enabling it to deliver on expectations.

Because of this, brand culture plays to the emotive intelligence and strengths of people working within an organisation. It is the agile, human, empowered and relatable side of a modern day entity. In our model, brand culture encompasses beliefs, behaviours, signals, workplace environments and how easily people feel they can innovate and respond to what happens in a marketplace. In a powerful brand culture, people respond based on the brand rather than ‘by the book’.

Brands come to life through people

A brand culture recognises that today’s consumers buy brands habitually and expect the people who they associate with that brand to behave in ways that conform with their perceptions of what that brand will be. The brands embody particular ideas, and buyers expect the people they deal with to align with that. For buyers, that consistency is a trust factor. Brands keep their promises through their people, and therefore through their brand culture.

Company cultures value conformity

Most company cultures value the same things, for all the reasons given above. They think about what they want people to do, rather than what they want them to feel. In the eyes of many decision makers, company values should set out the minimal attitudinal and quality standards for participation. So they trot out “values” that sound exactly the same as everyone else, including all their competitors. According to research cited by Gustavo Razzetti, 90% of large organisations reference ethical behaviour or use the word “integrity,” 88% mention commitment to customers, and 76% cite teamwork and trust.

Brand cultures lock in differences

In contrast to the company culture, a powerful brand culture is looking to lock-in the differences in attitude and belief that make it distinctive from its competitors. To do that, it does three things: it shares a purpose and vision with the brand strategy to ensure the highest goals are consistent; it articulates values and behaviours that are special to the brand and that endorse, emotionally, what the culture needs to think and feel to perform; and it shapes a brand enemy that acts as a focus point for what the brand most wants to counter.

To do this, it brings an edgy attitude and upbeat language to the cultural code that encourages people to go beyond what they might have been told to do elsewhere. A brand culture should be fearless and confident – encouraging positive tribalism and giving people real opportunities to speak up for the brand. Acknowledgement, belonging and support sit alongside candour, brand passion and open access to leaders and brand owners to make the best things happen for the brand.

Further reading: How to develop, lock in and apply powerful brand values

Together, differently

Company culture and brand culture represent an holistic way of bringing people together. Instead of brand culture vs company culture, each complements and counter-balances the other. Which also explains why they can show up quite differently.

For a company culture, the signs of success are unity and harmony within the culture. For a brand culture, however, success is all about interpreting the strategy, and configuring teams in the right ways emotionally to project the brand into the market in ways that win over audiences.

If there is only one brand across the organisation, brand culture vs company culture ideally operates like left vs right brain – fusing discipline and energy into a co-ordinated, responsive whole. But if there are several brands, then each may have its own distinct culture – influenced and infused by how each culture defines itself, the markets it works in and the success markers the brand pursues.

Interested to find out more about how a Principled Culture could work to lift your brand’s overall performance? Need help aligning your brand strategy or how you should reconcile your brand culture vs company culture? Contact us to talk through the differences with our strategist.

Acknowledgements
Photo by Margarida CSilva on Unsplash

 

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