FUSION Assessment
What is the state of brand-culture fusion at your organization? Find out with the FUSION Assessment. It will show you:
- If your organization has the core values that it needs to cultivate your desired culture and achieve your brand vision
- How big the gap is between your existing brand identity and the one you aspire to
- In what areas your brand and culture are out of sync
- …and more.
Why Take the Assessment
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.
Take the FUSION Assessment to determine your “desired culture”—the culture you ought to cultivate to support and advance your brand identity, or the brand identity you’d like to evolve to. You’ll also have an opportunity to assess how far off you are from your desired culture and to pinpoint where you need to make changes in your brand or culture (or both) to fuse them together.
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 calculates your overall Fusion Score. 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.
It also provides insights on employee engagement at your organization. Unlike standard employee engagement surveys, this assessment investigates the nature and degree of your employees’ personal and emotional engagement with your brand, their day-to-day engagement with your brand, and their engagement in 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.
Each category in this part of the assessment corresponds to the strategies that is presented in FUSION, the book.
Individual or Group Assessment
The FUSION Assessment is now available to be taken individually or as a group. If you take the Assessment as an individual, you will assess your organization on several dimensions and you’ll receive a personalized report that shows the results of your inputs and compares them to the average of the thousands of people who have taken the assessment over the past few years. Check it out now here – it’s free!
If you would like your leadership team, department, or entire company to take the Assessment, each person will complete the Assessment on their own, and then I will deliver a report that shows the results from your entire group. Sub-group analysis (by function, region, or other variables) is also available. My analysis will include a custom presentation of conclusions and recommendations for how your organization can achieve brand-culture fusion. Contact me for an estimate (fees start at $15,000 USD.)
Learn More
To learn more about the Assessment and how to interpret and use your results, contact Denise Lee Yohn now.