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What Is A Brand Culture and How Does It Work?

Welcome to Dan On It! I encourage you to comment, refer to others and follow future posts. Dan Harris

Here’s What I Learned

I recently read an excellent article from Douglas B, Holt in the Harvard Business Online. The article was called Brands and Branding, published March of 2003. In Holt’s article, he wrote about the importance of brand cultures in branding. It started me thinking about new branding initiatives, new product launches, building a brand from scratch, and even managing a personal brand and how it all works. First thing I did before starting to write this post was to look up, “What is culture?” on Wikipedia. 

Cultivate Your Brand

Here is what I found. The word culture comes from the latin word cultura, which stems from colere, meaning “to cultivate”. Hmmm. Cultivate, just like farmers that cultivate the soil and work the earth to grow crops, a company, or person has to work “the market” to foster the growth of their company, product or personal brand. When you finally complete the branding process you will most likely have all the visual elements and systems in place, websites built and collateral ready, messages prepared and and employees trained on what to say, and how to say it. If you think you’re done you’re kidding yourself.

As the creator or care taker of the brand your work has only just begun. Now the really hard work begins. You must cultivate what you’ve created in the marketplace, socialize the message, show consistent images, ensure the scents you’ve branded are appealing and memorable, socialize the sounds and surround and engage your prospects, customers, employees, and shareholders in the brand. This cannot happen just once. It must be ongoing to be successful. If a new brand had instructions, I think they would be similar to those of many shampoos you purchase today.

“For best results, apply, lather, rinse and repeat.” The only change I would make is to add… “repeat continuously, lather vigorously until your ready to retire the brand.” 

Build Brand Buzz

The ultimate goal of cultivating your brand is to create and build brand buzz. This buzz is passed along from one, hopefully on to many. As your employees, customers, influencers and your target market experience the complete package, gain value from your offering, the brand will build a reputation. If the efforts are a success, employees, customers and even prospects and influencers will start to talk about, write about, and  and refer to the brand in personal stories. They associate with what you as the brand builder have created.

When buzz happens and the brand recognizes the success, you will see brands producing and widely distributing testimonials, cases studies, customers success stories, best practice white papers and participate in interviews. In some cases brands can even convince influencers, customers, and partners to participate on panels at trade shows to tell their specific story on the record. It’s great when the stories and buzz is good and you can bask in the glow of success. Please be aware, bad buzz can be bad, but can it be good?

Can Bad Buzz Be Good

Can bad buzz or negative stories also help you cultivate the brand? The answer is YES. It all depends on the way the brand reacts to the negative story and handles the situation in market. You obviously want customers telling others how well they were treated, taken care of, assisted, or compensated. What you do not want are negative stories destroying all the hard work, and positive stories you’ve been able to cultivate.

A Bad Buzz Nightmare

Your worst nightmare as a brand would be a feature story in a major publication. You hear about examples of this all the time. Nestle experienced this first hand when their Arrowhead brand bottle water plant expansion ended up in a Business Week article titled A Town Torn Apart by Nestlé. The Nestle brand is known world wide for everything from candy, water to even Hot Pockets. When stories become articles, articles become news, and news spreads. When this happens, the brand, it buzz both good and bad and all the stories enter popular culture. Where do they end up? They could end up on 60 Minutes, the Today Show, Jay Leno, YouTube, JibJab, blogs, and other social networks. Yes, even this post is acting as an extension of brand stories entering popular culture.  

Buckle Your Seats. You’re Entering Pop Culture

 

The ride through pop culture could be a smooth ride or extremely turbulent. Only time will tell. Mr. Holt points out in his article, that brand cultures can take on a life of their own outside your target market if pop culture gets a hold of your brand. Another Nestle example of this is  Jim Gaffigan’s “Hot Pockets” comedy sketch.

He seems to have it in for Hot Pockets. He makes fun of the brand, the product and the people who created and market the product to the tune of hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.  This example of negative popular culture in action resulted in Nestle, buying Hot Pockets from Chef American for 2.6 Billion. At the time of the sale, Hot Pockets was expected to make $720 Million. Hmmm. I wonder if Nestle ir the team from Chef America gave Jim Gaffigan a cut? Based on how brand cultures work, I am confident that Jim’s stories, as irreverent as they are, helped Chef America, and now Nestle continue to make millions.

Bottomline

What is the bottomline? Cultivate means work. It’s not easy work. There is no formula for fast acting brand. Once you create the brand it has to be introduced into market, make friends, build relationships, make mistakes, fix those mistakes, apologize, celebrate, win, lose, and over time have stories to tell, and people to tell them. 

Comment And Start Some Buzz

What are you doing to cultivate your brand? comment on this post and tell me. Who knows, this post may result in some buzz for your brand when the spiders pick it up, others read it, feed it, and start to tell stories about DanOnIt. I’m crossing my fingers hoping they are good! 

Up Next I’m going to focus on another article I read from MIT Sloan Management Review on measuring brand health.

 

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