FUSION Assessment Results

Thank you for taking the FUSION Assessment.

The Assessment and results report are in beta test form until March, 2018, when the book FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies is released.  Detailed information about the results of the Assessment and instructions on next steps after taking it will be provided at that time.  Please sign-up to receive updates about the release, including when more Assessment information becomes available.

For now, the following is general introduction to Brand/Culture Fusion and your Assessment results.

Why You Need Fusion

Ask people how to develop a good corporate culture and most of them will immediately suggest providing free employee lunches like Google does and eliminating vacation limits as they’ve done at Virgin.  Rarely do people point to encouraging employees to disagree with their managers, as Amazon does, or firing top performers the way Jack Welch did at GE.

But in fact, it’s having a distinct corporate culture – not a copycat of another firm’s culture – that allows these great organizations to produce phenomenal results.  Each of these companies has aligned and integrated its culture and its brand to create a combined powerful engine of competitive advantage and growth.  Their leaders understand that a strong, differentiated culture contributes to a strong, differentiated brand — and that an extraordinary brand can inspire and motivate an extraordinary culture.

It doesn’t matter if your company culture is friendly or competitive, nurturing or analytical.  If your culture and your brand are driven by the same purpose and values and if you fuse them together into a single guiding force for your company, you will win the competitive battle for customers and employees, future-proof your business from failures and downturns, and produce an organization that operates with integrity and authenticity.

Your Brand/Culture Type

To identify the optimal Brand/Culture Fusion for your organization, start your brand type — or the type you aspire to.  There are nine primary brands types or ways that brands compete and are positioned — from Performance brands to Luxury brands, Service brands, Value brands, etc.  Although two or three brand types might seem to be relevant to your brand, you should identify a primary one — the one that aligns best with your overarching purpose, resonates most with your organization, and gives you the most impact with your customers.

Each brand type requires a certain organizational culture.  If your vision is to be an Innovative brand, for example, then your culture must encourage a test-and-learn mentality among your employees.  If you’ve set your sights on being a Style brand, then you need to infuse your culture with design and creativity.  The first section of the Brand/Culture Fusion Assessment tool helps you identify the primary core values that correspond to your desired brand type.  You learn that the values of achievement, excellence, and consistency are most appropriate for a Performance brand, for example, while purpose, high commitment, and shared values are the values needed for a socially- or environmentally-responsible brand.  These core values indicate the starting points for cultivating your desired culture.

Brand/Culture Fusion Diagnosis

The next part of the Brand/Culture Fusion Assessment helps you determine how well your brand and your culture are integrated and aligned today and compares your overall Fusion Score with the average for your industry.  This section also pinpoints the biggest disconnects between your brand and culture, including whether or not your Brand Purpose and core values are used as filters when recruiting, training, and evaluating employees, and if your physical workplace environment distinguishes your company from others like it.  Each category in this part of the assessment corresponds to the strategies that will be presented in FUSION, the book.

Employee Engagement

The Brand/Culture Fusion Assessment also provides insights on employee engagement at your organization.  Unlike standard employee engagement surveys, this assessment investigates the nature and degree of your employees’ engagement with your organization as a whole, with your Brand Purpose and core values, and with your brand strategy.  Armed with this knowledge, you can develop targeted engagement strategies and initiatives to cultivate Brand/Culture Fusion where your organization needs it most.

Learn More

To learn more about the Assessment and how to interpret and use your results, sign-up for updates — or contact Denise Lee Yohn now.