brand as business bit:  I got a response to my last “brand as business brief“, Value and Values, that I just have to share with you.  It’s from Kevin Knight, who along with his wife Heather, run Anjou Bakery, a “a thriving incubator of good taste in food” in Cashmere, WA (about 2 hours East of Seattle.)  Kevin writes:

“I am currently re-reading “Setting the Table” by Danny Meyer and at the end of the introduction he says ‘Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.’  He defines Great Service as delivering on your promise, steps 1 – x, a monologue, what your company sets out to do, etc. Great Hospitality on the other hand is a human dialog that makes people feel good. It’s thoughtful and creative, customized and intelligent.

To achieve all you can be (in life and business) you must be good at both…In our business I try to tell everyone to think of each customer as if they were their grandmother. A bit corny perhaps, but for me that idea sets the stage for a positive interaction.”

It’s because of retailers like Kevin and the hundreds of thousands of others out there who “get it,” that I believe retail is far from dead.  Long live retail!

P.S. (My next “brand as business brief” on brand experiences is coming out next week — don’t miss out — subscribe here.)

brand as business bit:  “Do well by doing good” has become the ultimate rallying cry for corporate social responsibility (CSR) – and case studies from Walmart to Nike to Timberland prove it is possible to benefit society and the bottomline. What’s more, CSR programs can make companies more innovative:

According to research featured in April’s Harvard Business Review, “CSR engagement broadens a company’s access to outside knowledge, market preferences, and new technologies.”  And that in turn helps firms come up with dramatic innovations.  Out of 128 firms studied, companies in the top third in terms of CSR activities brought out, on average, 47 new products a year, while companies in the bottom third brought out only 12.

Glad to see further confirmation of the integral link between values and business growth.

BurgerKing, Volvo, Coke, LEGO, and ShoeDazzle were some of the brands in my recent conversations.  Peruse this recap of my content this month to see what you might have missed:

brand-building:

• What a Strong Brand Does for a Small Business — my OPEN Forum column on why small businesses should invest in brand-building from the start
• Has ShoeDazzle Lost Its Dazzle?  — a POV on ShoeDazzle’s move away from its subscription model
• Basketball Teams and Brands – a bit on what brand-builders can learn from Josh Harris’s moves to rejuvenate the 76ers

business and innovation:

• Once Upon a Company – a guest post of mine on the upMover blog about the internal power of storytelling
• Storytelling Strategies – a follow-up bit on storytelling best practices
• Could ‘Pink Slime’ Be Rebranded? – a comment from me on what “slimed” companies should do
• From Values to Action – a post relaying what I learned about values-based leadership from Kellogg professor Harry Kreamer
• Hip Help – a bit about how Help Remedies is turning drug marketing on its head
• Mary-Ann Somers on Coca-Cola’s New Ventures  — an interview about the work of Coke’s Venturing and Emerging Brands business unit

brand communications:

• Burger King Enlists Celebs to Call Attention To New Menu That McD’s Already Has — a quote of mine about how Burger King seems to be copying others, instead of leapfrogging them
• McCabe on Advertising – a bit about how Ed McCabe used an iconoclastic approach to etch into our brains Volvo’s brand identity

restaurants and retail:

• Make Your Ethnic Concept a Familiar Favorite – my latest QSR Magazine column about introducing an unfamiliar concept
• Five P’s to a Priceless CE Retail Experience – a guest post on CEA’s Digital Dialogue about how to combat the showrooming effect
• Fast Food Line-Up – a bit comparing brand perceptions and tagline recall for Burger King, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell
• Brand Experience Briefs:  video briefings of my insights and analysis of a Chipotle-inspired pizza concept, Pie-ology, and the LEGO store

Now…onward to May!

Culture is quite the hot topic in business these days.  The adage “Culture eats strategy for lunch” has been acknowledged for ages, but it seems the importance of culture is being emphasized now more than ever.

Perhaps it’s because people think questionable business ethics are to blame for the recent economic collapses around the world.  Or perhaps corporate belt-tightening has led to lean workforces which challenge leaders to figure out how to motivate and retain them.  Or perhaps business is experiencing a spiritual awakening of sorts as Baby Boomer leaders reach the age where meaning becomes more important than money and as Millennials join the workforce with expectations of responsibility and significance for themselves and their companies.

Whatever the reason, business leaders are now inundated with exhortations to focus on the culture of their organizations.  The New York Times bestsellers list is filled with books on the topic:  Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, and Start with Why – the latter written by Simon Sinek who explains, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Pundits like Seth Godin, Jim Collins, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter has amassed huge followers with perspectives on culture – the latter recently writing, “In organizations that I call ‘supercorps’ — companies that are innovative, profitable, and responsible — widespread dialogue about the interpretation and application of values enhances accountability, collaboration, and initiative.”

With such emphasis on culture, people might conclude that it should be a company’s #1 priority – but they would be wrong.  Culture is not enough.

Please don’t misunderstand me.  I am a huge believer in the importance of purpose, values, principles, and beliefs to organizations.  A vital, vibrant culture unifies, aligns, focuses, motivates, and propels.  But it is not enough to produce a profitable business.  Culture must be linked to, and pursued with the same rigor and vigor as, the customer experience.

The contrast between Netflix and Zappos makes the point.  People have held both companies in high regard for their emphasis on culture.

Back a few years ago articles like “Other Companies Should Have To Read This Internal Netflix Presentation” and “Netflix Does It Right” outlined the company’s cultural practices — like not having a vacation policy (employees are encouraged to take the time they need) and offering employees high salaries instead of bonuses so they can decide how they want to spend the money.

The culture at Zappos has also been esteemed as evidenced by the piece in Booz Allen’s strategy+business publication, “At Zappos, Culture Pays.”   The popularity of the company’s approach has led to many keynote addresses and interviews by CEO Tony Hsieh, tours of their headquarters by executives from around the world, and subscription-based content available through the Zappos Insights website.

While both companies have remarkable cultures, though, they differ in the integration of their cultures and the customer experience.  The culture at Netflix seems a separate endeavor from customer experience, while at Zappos the two are closely and clearly linked.

Netflix’s “Reference Guide on Our Freedom & Responsibility Culture” reads like a human resources piece.  Its first page declares, “Culture is How a Firm Operates” and asks “What practices give Netflix the best chance of continuous success for many generations of technology and people?”

In outlining the company’s values, the document explains, “We Particularly Value in our Colleagues these Nine Behaviors and Skills…” including:

• Judgment – “You think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do.”
• Communication – “You listen well, instead of reacting fast, so you can better understand.”
• Innovation – “You re-conceptualize issues to discover practical solutions to hard problems.”

At first blush, these are indeed admirable qualities to seek in employees and to embrace as company values.  But if you consider what it takes to make a successful business, they seem too internally-focused and almost academic – especially when compared to Zappos’ Family Core Values.

Zappos’ website explains the company has 10 core values “from which we develop our culture, our brand, and our business strategies.”

• Number one is “Deliver WOW Through Service.”    “To WOW,” the company states, “you must differentiate yourself, which means doing something a little unconventional and innovative…We are not an average company, our service is not average, and we don’t want our people to be average. We expect every employee to deliver WOW.”
• The link between Zappos’ culture and customer experience is also explained in its value “Create Fun And A Little Weirdness.”  “We want the company to have a unique and memorable personality…One of the side effects of encouraging weirdness is that it encourages people to think outside the box and be more innovative.”
• “Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication” is another value the company embraces internally and externally.  “We value strong relationships in all areas: with managers, direct reports, customers (internal and external), vendors, business partners, team members, and co-workers…It’s important to always act with integrity in your relationships, to be compassionate, friendly, loyal, and to make sure that you do the right thing and treat your relationships well.”

At Zappos the connection between culture and customer experience fuels the business.  It may be that Netflix also applies its values externally, but the connection isn’t obvious.  And that can make all the difference.

In fact, the absence of that explicit link may be part of what caused the company’s recent debacle.  I haven’t analyzed the situation closely enough to know this for sure, but I suspect if CEO Reed Hastings had applied the values listed above (i.e., clear articulation of intent, careful listening, practical solutions) to consumers and the customer experience — not only employees — the separation of the company’s streaming and rental businesses of Qwikster might have been executed and accepted differently.

It doesn’t make sense for a company to develop purpose or values to inspire and engage employees if those aren’t inextricably linked with how the company inspires and engages its customers.  Without the alignment and integration of culture and customer experience, at best you end up with employees who are well-meaning but don’t produce the right results.  At worst, you confuse employees as well as customers and cause both groups to question your integrity.

In a future post I’ll introduce tools and approaches that successful companies have used to prescribe optimal customer experiences, but for now let me end with some of the remarkable results Zappos has achieved by integrating culture and customer experience:

• sales growth from $0 to $1BB in less than 10 years
• a rich acquisition by Amazon
• hundreds of thousands of loyal customers who pay price premiums and promote the brand
• employees who express their commitment to the company with comments like, “In one word, Zappos Culture is AMAZING!…Zappos makes us WANT to come to work.  Every day is something different…I am proud to say that I work for this company and cannot wait to see what the future holds for us.”

related posts:

• how to succeed in small business
• circumvent a HR crisis with employee brand engagement
• experiencing the sharp experience

Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals, knows a thing or two about small business.  His company has been developing apps for small businesses for seven years.  But it’s how he runs his own company that reveals his keen insight for how to be a successful small business.

I had the pleasure of hearing Jason talk as part of a Chicago Ideas Week lab (I was in the Second City for a speaking engagement and wanted to participate in what was billed as an “ecosystem of innovation, exploration, and intellectual recreation.”)  For nearly two hours, Jason generously took questions from our group of 30, riffing on topics ranging from his book REWORK to his personal background to Chicago’s tech scene.

What stood out the most to me were his thoughtful and enlightened perspectives on running a small business.  So with many thanks to Jason, here’s his list of advice for entrepreneurs:

1. Grow as slowly as you can – It seems counterintuitive that slowing down actually fuels growth, but Jason explained that growing slowly allows you to make sure you have the right people.  “When you expand quickly, it’s very difficult to maintain culture.  That’s the problem with a lot of start-ups that are VC-backed and have a lot of funding:  the money is used to hire people.  And if you hire too quickly and you’re not careful about who you hire, you end up in a situation where people aren’t acclimated because there’s too many people too fast.”

Moreover, growing slowly allows you to personally foster your culture.  Jason explained, “You’re going to have influence on each person you hire. And let’s say you hire 10 people a month, you’re only going to have 10% influence on each individual person.  If you only hire one or two people a month, you can spend a lot of time with those people and get them to understand what you’re trying to do and then they in turn can spread the culture. But if everyone’s only getting a tiny bit of culture, they can’t spread that – they have to hang on to that, there’s not enough to go around.  So that’s one of the advantages of hiring slowly.”

2. Hire carefully – A corollary to the first principle is to hire slowly.  Be selective; hire for culture fit as much as for skills and experience; and evaluate real work during the selection process.

“We don’t look at resumes,” Jason explained.  “I don’t really care what someone says they did somewhere else because it’s very hard to verify that stuff.  We give people actual work to do for us and we pay them for it.  For example, when we’re hiring a designer, we’ll give them a project to do, it takes them one week, we give them $1500, and we say, ‘Here’s a problem, how would you solve it?’  If it’s a programmer, we usually look at their open source contributions.  For customer service people, we have them write sample responses.”  That way, you get to evaluate what they actually can do vs. what they say they can.

3. Drive culture by example – Further on culture…I’ve previously written that culture is one of a business leader’s most important responsibilities.  Jason talked about his approach: “You need to lead by example. Culture isn’t something that you create through words.  It’s all about actions, about consistent actions.  It doesn’t really matter what you say the culture is — it’s about how you live, how you work together, how you treat people.”

4. Motivate people with the work – Different people are motivated by different things – for some, it’s the money; for others, it’s the variety of projects; for others, it’s the ability to impact something substantially.    As Jason explained,   “You just have to try to get to know everybody and then put them on the types of things that motivate them.”  But he added, “At the end of the day, you have to motivate people by giving them interesting things to do and work on products they believe in.”

5. Have a point of view – When asked about how he’s developed and promoted 37Signals’ uniqueness, Jason answered, “I don’t think enough companies have a point a view that’s obvious.  Mostly because they’re afraid or they let lawyers determine what the company is, how they speak, what they do, how they act — that’s going to dilute any sort of edge.”

“So for us [our POV] is:  let’s be honest about who we are, what we believe in, and let’s share those opinions and be open about it — because it’s going to turn off certain people and turn on others, and the ones it turns on are going to be really loyal, they’re going to be the ones behind you, who will fight for you. And the ones you turn off, you don’t want anyway because they’re not the kind of people you want to do business with.  By being clear about what you believe in, you’re going to attract the right kind of employee, the right kind of customer, the right kind of media coverage, a bunch of things that are going to work really well for you.”

6. Don’t think about marketing – Jason got the Lab attendees’ attention early on when he stated not to waste money on PR.  Later he went even further when he discouraged people from developing elaborate marketing plans.

To explain, he offered the following insight:  “We don’t ever really think of marketing as a department or as an idea.  Marketing is everything that you do.  It’s how you speak to your customers, how quickly you get back to your customers, it’s the quality of your product, it’s the word on the button, it’s the thank you email, it’s the cancellation email, it’s the refund policy, all that stuff is marketing.  Just do the right thing and make good things.”

7. Solve real problems – “Simple tools that people use” is how Jason described 37Signals’ product strategy.  But usefulness isn’t just an attribute of its products – it’s one of the core values of the company.

Jason recommended entrepreneurs focus on “solving a real problem, not an imaginary problem.”   “Everything is a problem,” he explained, but you should ask yourself, “Is it a real problem that people are going to pay for, that advertisers are going to want to deal with?  Is this thing worth paying for or am I just making something cool (which is OK if you know that’s what you’re dealing with.)”  Ultimately, usefulness is the litmus test for whether you have a business, or just a hobby.

8. Be a good editor — A stumbling block for many tech start-ups, Jason believes, is wasting time on things that don’t really matter.

“You’ve got to know what not to waste time on.  Raising money is a good example.  A lot of entrepreneurs spend a lot of time raising money when they don’t really need to. [There are a lot of things] people put a lot of energy and time into when they should be focused purely on their product – making it really damn good and working with really great people, caring about the people you work with and the people you want to hire, the people you want to surround yourself with.  You’ve just got to figure out what’s really important…You can spend a lot of time on stuff that’s cool to have but not central to have and then you miss the essential stuff but the cool stuff doesn’t matter.  It’s a matter of being a really good editor.”

9. Put yourself on the line – If you have the opportunity to actually build a product vs. only provide services, do it, recommends Jason.  He explained that people who only give advice to other people don’t ever have responsibility for what actually gets done.  (Yes, I realize he’s talking about people like me!)  By actually making a product, he says, “You get to see whether your ideas are any good.”  Putting yourself out there is risky, but it’s the only way to know the truth.

10. Think principles, not plans – This list of principles ends with a principle about principles because that’s how Jason responded when he was asked about what the future holds for 37Signals.  He referenced a quote about the problem with goals which says that goals are limiting because they’re made for the person you are when you set them, not the person you’re going to be.  He also realizes he wants to be able to consider new ideas as they arise – he doesn’t want them to be stuck on an inflexible path.  So, he explained, he doesn’t spend too much time thinking about the future because having guiding principles is more useful than specific plans.

Although this advice speaks to leaders of small businesses, it’s clear Jason and his colleagues don’t intend for 37 Signals to stay small forever.  Growing the company’s business, as well as its influence on the industry and people’s lives in general, is very much their ambition.  Based on what Jason shared, I have every confidence – and even more hope – they will succeed.

related posts:

• lessons from lady gaga
• nine lessons from the mit enterprise forum

Today’s interview is sure to be an eye-opener.  John Gerzema,  author of The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How to Avoid It and Spend Shift: How the Post-Crisis Values Revolution Is Changing the Way We Buy, Sell, and Live, and President of Brand Asset Consulting, joins us to talk about how brands can connect with today’s consumer.

I had known John by reputation and through Twitter only until last year when I got to hear him speak at Brand Managecamp.  His talk then about the need for businesses to deliver both values and value was really provocative — and served as a foretaste for all the insights in Spend Shift which was just released a few weeks ago.

In this interview, John reports on extensive research he conducted for the book which led him to some key conclusions:

• consumers are increasingly spending money with values — theirs and the businesses they patronize — in mind
• consumers have realized they may be less rich but they have more power
• companies can create paths to brand preference by connecting to consumers’ values

Take a listen and then follow-up by checking out Spend Shift and John’s site.

Hope you get as much out of the interview and book as I did!

other interviews:

• Dick Lynch on the turnaround at Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen
• Ernan Roman on voice of customer marketing
• Sheryl Adkins Green on global brand building

]]> http://deniseleeyohn.com/bites/2010/11/19/john-gerzema-on-how-to-connect-with-todays-consumer/feed/ 4 http://deniseleeyohn.com/bites/2010/10/19/experiencing-the-sharp-experience/ http://deniseleeyohn.com/bites/2010/10/19/experiencing-the-sharp-experience/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:47:07 +0000 denise lee yohn http://deniseleeyohn.com/bites/?p=4259

What happens when a $2.1BB+ organization re-commits its 20,000+ people to its vision and values?!   I got to find out last week when I attended “Extraordinary: The Power of Ten” the All-Staff Assembly put on by Sharp Healthcare. Thanks to a generous invitation from Mark Tomaszewicz, the director of The Sharp Experience, I got to experience first-hand the truly remarkable event.

Some background: Sharp Healthcare introduced The Sharp Experience in 2001 as an organizational vision and commitment to transform the health care experience. It is intended to enhance how Sharp people interact with and serve their patients, their affiliated physicians, and each other – it’s really their culture. The Sharp Experience vision is to make Sharp be “the best place to work, the best place to practice medicine and the best place to receive care.”

It’s been a phenomenal success:

• Sharp is in the 85th percentile of national rankings in patient satisfaction.
• Last year for the third year in a row, readers of The San Diego Union-Tribune recognized Sharp HealthCare as San Diego’s “Best Hospital” in its Best of San Diego Readers’ Poll.
• In November 2007, it received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest presidential honor for quality and organizational performance excellence.
• And even though Sharp is a non-profit, its financial performance is significant — it has grown its market share leadership for 10 years in a row.

Every year since the inception of The Sharp Experience, it holds an All-Staff Assembly as a way to engage the entire Sharp HealthCare team in recommitting to “the purpose and worth of our work and the difference we make in the lives of others.” (They actually do the assembly 3 times over 2 days so that everyone can attend.)

It’s part-inspiration, part-education, and part-celebration. The Assembly makes a powerful statement about how important the organization views employee engagement to The Sharp Experience.

I don’t think words can describe what the event is like, so check out the highlight reel I made:

The Sharp Experience All-Staff Assembly Highlight Reel by DLYohn from Denise Lee Yohn on Vimeo.

I was blown away by the event. That Sharp would invest the time, money, and energy to put on this kind of event is, well, extraordinary. Throughout my career, I’ve been involved with a lot of corporate efforts with similar objectives, both as a producer and as an attendee, but nothing comes close to what I experienced.

There are three particular things about the event which stood out:

1. Multiple entry points to understanding The Sharp Experience – The event included a full-range of experiences which allowed the attendee to engage with The Sharp Experience content in different ways. From the moving videos of Sharp patient stories, to the awards ceremony acknowledging people’s distinctive performance, to an inspiring spoken-word performance by Sekou Andrews, to the crazy dancing in the aisles, to the provocative speech about unlocking human potential by Sir Ken Robinson, to… Regardless of where you were coming from, what kind of input you prefer, and whether you wanted to learn, be inspired, have fun, or be challenged, the event connected with you.

I once heard MIT Professor Marvin Minsky talk about the importance of experiencing something in multiple ways in order to really understand it.  This event demonstrated this principle. It offered up different ways to understand The Sharp Experience and in doing so, ensured that all Sharp employees were re-engaged in its vision.

2. Fun! – The event was a lot of fun. And I don’t mean that kind of manufactured fun that corporate events often feature – you know, the kind that seems a little awkward but you feel like you have to play along in order to show your corporate spirit.

The Sharp Assembly was truly fun. It started when you walked up to the event – employees formed a tunnel of cheering and clapping for each and every attendee to walk through.  And the fun lasted through to hilarious videos of executives doing Harry Potter spoofs and Beyonce moves. The event lasted 4 hours but the time flew because it was fun.

Healthcare is something to be taken seriously but I applaud Sharp for making it fun.

3. One brand – Oftentimes when I’m speaking to people about employee brand engagement, the question of employee experience vs. customer experience arises. Companies increasingly use terms like “employment branding” and “internal branding” to describe efforts to create a unique employee experience which they can promote in the recruitment process. People ask me if “the consumer brand” and “the employment brand” should be related — and how.

The Sharp Experience – and the way it is served up at the All-Staff Assembly — answers the question more clearly and convincingly than I ever have: It’s all one thing. There isn’t one way of talking to patients and another for engaging employees. There aren’t two separate set of values which define what it’s like to work at Sharp vs. to be treated at Sharp. The Sharp Experience weaves together seamlessly the employee experience and the patient experience into a single symbiotic experience.  The result is a brand and an organization with clarity, focus, and integrity.

The organization’s vision speaks powerfully to all audiences: “Sharp will redefine the health care experience through a culture of caring, quality, service, innovation, and excellence. Sharp will be recognized by employees, physicians, patients, volunteers, and the community as: the best place to work, the best place to practice medicine, and the best place to receive care…Sharp will become the best health system in the universe.”

From my experience at the All-Staff Assembly, I’d say they’re well on their way.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak at Dine America, the invitation-only conference for senior executives in foodservice, produced by QSR Magazine.  Insights from my session, The Price is Right (winning pricing strategies for QSRs) will be featured in an upcoming edition of my monthly column with the magazine.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some of the notable quotables from other presenters at the confab including:

• Joe Tortorice, CEO of Jason’s Deli — whose talk about servant leadership and the unique culture and values of his company was truly inspiring
• Cheryl Bachelder, President of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen — who outlined a great play-by-play of Popeyes turnaround
• Howard Putnam, former chairman of Southwest Airlines — who entertained and challenged the audience with his views on leadership

Enjoy!

Today my series on brand value creation comes to a close with a look at companies’ Learning and Growth.  Previous posts have examined how brands create value for companies from the Customer, Financial (2 posts) ,  and Internal Business Process perspectives.

The Learning and Growth quadrant of the Balanced Scorecard asks, “To achieve our vision, how will we sustain our ability to change and improve?”  The results produced by a strong brand relative to this quadrant may be the most difficult to quantify, but they are perhaps the most significant.   Here are 3 ways a brand creates value by impacting an organization’s Learning and Growth:

1.  When the “brand as business” management approach is engaged, the purpose and values of the organization are clarified.   Using the brand as the North Star for the business, your company not only adapts to outside changes appropriately but also create its own changes and use them to its advantage.

• Patagonia provides an example of a company which uses its brand — their “philosophies” — to be prepared for change. Yvon Chouinard, the company’s founder and owner, says, “What good does having a fixed set of written philosophies accomplish when everything else in the business world is so dynamic?…The answer is that our philosophies aren’t rules; they’re guidelines.  They’re the keystones of our approach to any project, and although they are ‘set in stone,’ their application to a situation isn’t…We have made many mistakes during the past decade, but at no point have we lost our way for very long.  We have the philosophies for a rough map, the only kind that’s useful in a business world whose contours, unlike those of the mountains, change constantly and without much warning.” (emphasis mine)

2.  Your brand can help you actually change the way business is done if you adopt a bold and differentiated brand platform.  Jim Collins, in his book Built to Last, describes how “Bill Hewlett and David Packard envisioned HP as a role-model corporation, known for progressive personnel practices, innovative and entrepreneurial culture, and an unbroken string of products that make a technical contribution.”  So they instituted many practices to manifest this bold vision – for example:

• HP introduced a profit-sharing plan which paid out the same percentage to the janitor as to the CEO and created a catastrophic medical insurance plan at a time when such actions were virtually unheard of.
• Beginning in the 1950’s, HP forsook the hiring of engineers from industry and recruited less experienced but more talented graduating seniors from respected engineering schools.
• Self-imposed rigorous standards led HP to bypass high-volume markets like IBM-compatible personal computers for a period of time because of its commitment to reject me-too or copycat new products in favor of those representing a technological contribution.

Clearly the “HP Way,” as the brand’s tenets became known, drove that organization’s learning and growth.

3.  Your brand can fuel the development of a robust organizational culture, by explaining why you do what you do in a way that gives more meaning to your relationships with customers and stakeholders alike.   After dissecting the factors that have driven the success of some of greatest organizations in recent history, including Apple and the Walt Disney studio, management author Warren Bennis concludes in his book Organizing Genius, “[They] think they are on a mission from God…they believe they are doing something vital, even holy…their clear, collective purpose makes everything they do seem meaningful and valuable.”  Your employee’s work can be transformed into more than churning out products; stakeholders can see themselves are more than functional cogs in the company wheel.  Rather, they can see themselves as contributing to something that has more substantive and lasting impact.

This motivates them embrace and execute change more effectively.  As the consultants who contributed to the late 1990’s turnaround of Best Buy explain, continuous improvement and growth flow naturally out of an emotionally satisfying culture:  “’Why is this important?   What’s in it for me?  Can I be successful?’ To be ready for change, people must develop a compelling conviction that there are positive answers to these questions,” they state.

So a strong brand increases an organization’s ability to change and improve — thus creating long-lasting and far-reaching value.

I hope this series on Brand Value Creation has been a good one for you.  By running it, my intent has been to make the case that brands produce substantial positive results for business.  And, perhaps more importantly, to present a different point of view on what a brand is:  what a company does and how it does it.