How Company Culture Strengthens a Brand

This is part of a series on col­or, brand­ing and reflect­ing it not just through­out col­lat­er­al but with­in the total com­pa­ny cul­ture, writ­ten by NCD’s Mar­ket­ing Con­sul­tant Rochelle Joseph.

When a client comes to NCD for brand­ing, they are ini­tial­ly inter­est­ed in what we cre­ate visu­al­ly. But we approach it holis­ti­cal­ly know­ing that brand build­ing is not only about logos, web­site and col­lat­er­al. Those are very impor­tant ele­ments of mar­ket­ing the brand, but the brand itself is all about the mis­sion, vision and val­ues, and how the com­pa­ny — its employ­ees and the cul­ture with­in it, as well as its ser­vices or prod­ucts — reflects it.  Let’s look at a few examples.

How Company Culture Strengthens a brand

McDon­alds is one of the world’s most rec­og­nized brands, and just about the biggest fast food chain in the US. And what’s the first thing that comes to mind at its men­tion? The gold­en arch­es (if not their gold­en fries)! Their mis­sion is to make their restau­rant people’s favorite place to eat, and McDon­alds accom­plish­es this in sev­er­al ways.

It’s a cheery place with employ­ees dressed in red, yel­low and white uni­forms — includ­ing the smi­ley char­ac­ter Ronald McDon­ald. Those col­ors, car­ried through­out their din­ing and play areas, com­mu­ni­cate that McDon­alds is bright and friend­ly  — and that’s backed by employ­ee-client inter­ac­tions. Cus­tomers are greet­ed with enthu­si­asm when tak­ing orders — even if it’s late, even if they bring in lots of kids, antsy from car trav­el. It’s also afford­able, and the addi­tion of their play areas, 24-hour loca­tions, and easy acces­si­bil­i­ty makes it a wel­come place for the hun­gry look­ing to quick­ly refu­el and the weary need­ing cof­fee or a place to sit. It’s all there when you see the gold­en arch­es. The con­ti­nu­ity McDon­alds offers is depen­dent upon the employ­ees not just main­tain­ing their qual­i­ty stan­dards across the globe, but shar­ing their val­ue sys­tem to bring a cer­tain expe­ri­ence to their customers.

When you vis­it an Apple store, it’s often so crowd­ed you’d think you were at a night club. But employ­ees are eas­i­ly iden­ti­fied by their bright sol­id tee shirt, and head­sets — if they don’t imme­di­ate­ly approach you first, ask­ing how they can help. They wear head­sets and have the lat­est and coolest tablet in their hands to aid in you quick­ly being direct­ed to a per­son or a part of the store that you need. So you feel like there is lit­tle wait — and if there is, you have mul­ti­ples of their lat­est prod­ucts to try (which cre­ates a desire to own them).

It’s as if you have been pro­ject­ed to a very effi­cient future world, and the mes­sage is that you too can be as cur­rent and cool and effi­cient if you equip your­self with every­thing they sell. It clear­ly makes you feel that by using their tools, your busy life can be stream­lined like their clean logo and their sleek stuff — all in sig­na­ture sil­ver or white.

Steve Jobs led that cul­ture by liv­ing his own min­i­mal­ist image in a black tur­tle neck, wire rimmed glass­es and neat jeans. On a blank stage with a huge screen he paced back and forth once a year to unveil his newest prod­uct that would change the way the world works. Peo­ple would wait breath­less­ly for it. And if you were an Apple employ­ee, you felt belong­ing being in on the secret before the pub­lic. And every day at work in the Apple cul­ture, there is the pride in know they equip their cus­tomer with prod­ucts on the cut­ting edge of technology.

Air­lines are a strong case of com­pa­ny cul­ture reflect­ing the brand­ing, which trick­les down through every­thing from the tail on the plane, to the tick­ets and cock­tail nap­kins. It’s so com­pre­hen­sive, you can usu­al­ly iden­ti­fy which air­line an employ­ee works for sim­ply by what they are wear­ing. And, their uni­forms con­vey author­i­ty while their atti­tude makes them approach­able. And because they are deal­ing with the pub­lic first hand, whether sell­ing tick­ets or see­ing to your safe­ty on the plane, they must col­lab­o­rate based on the com­pa­ny val­ues… because in this mod­el, they are actu­al­ly the ones in charge! Because they deal with the pub­lic in a con­tained envi­ron­ment fraught with poten­tial com­pli­ca­tions and emer­gency sit­u­a­tions, they are high­ly trained in codes of ethics and con­duct set forth by their com­pa­ny and the industry.

As cus­tomers, we each have been on the receiv­ing end of these three com­pa­nies, and are so used to our response to their brand that, per­haps with­out even real­iz­ing it, we too are on board! And that is effec­tive brand­ing, it’s total­ly trig­gered by the graph­ics and mar­ket­ing you see.