How to Propel Your Brand Forward Using The Power of Your Culture with Mark Miller
Read time: 5.5 min
Get episode summaries delivered directly to your inbox HERE
Why is it that some organizations build the most amazing brands, but some fail to create anything compelling? Mark has an answer for us.
Mark Miller is a co-founder of Historic Agency and leads product strategy, marketing transformation and brand. He has rebranded nearly 100 organizations and specializes in all things strategy including brand, product and marketing. He is also the co-author of the Amazon bestseller “Culture Built My Brand."
APPLE PODCAST | SPOTIFY | STITCHER
Don’t see your podcast player? Click HERE
In this episode, we cover off on a variety of tips and topics:
What led to the writing of “Culture built my brand.”
The six elements of building a thriving internal culture
Most prolific examples of cultural elements seen in the wild
Culture can be built no matter the size of the organization
The untapped opportunity in health care
The agile approach to branding
KEY LESSONS
Culture is the main reason behind brand success or brand failure
When Mark and team asked themselves the question “why is it that some clients would take off after our rebrand, while some would go back to the old brand or not even launch at all?” They had a hunch.
“There was a pattern that we started to see with clients that were struggling to be successful in their own brand and owning their own brand - that was all cultural issues.”
A brand is typically thought of as the way others feel and say about you, but Mark helps us make the link between the external and the internal.
“There is something deeper to your brand and how you operate as an organization or a company. We found that really culture has more to do with your brand, then just what other people think. Because how you hire, how you fire, what you, what you prioritize in your budget, what decisions you make, what values drive, all of that ultimately trickles down to the customer experience and your product which is what people think about you”
And culture shows up not during the good times, but when things get rocky. Mark shares a personal story about Historic when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit.
“Almost 40% of our revenue was gone in two weeks. the first two weeks of covid, people just said, we're gonna cancel, and it doesn't matter the fees, some members of the management team didn't resonate with the values that we had as a company and the expectation on leadership and those kind of things. And so we were forced to make some decisions. We had to let some people go.”
And how prioritizing culture played a key part of their growth in a trying time.
“We wanted to refocus our culture…align to the things that were important. And it was amazing to see people step up. And people will perform better when they're in a culture that they connect with that makes sense to them… and they will step up for organizations because they love where they work.”
Culture is not just posters on the wall – there are six elements to building a thriving culture
Often, when you bring up culture, companies will point to the values they embody, often on their website or on the walls of the office. That’s certainly a starting point, but certainly not the end. Mark talks about the six different elements they’ve found in their research that organizations can use to create an environment for culture to thrive.
1. Principles
“Everyone has values, but principles are behaviors. They teach your team how to actually work. Like how to behave, how do they treat each other? How do they treat customers?”
2. Architecture
“That's the organizational systems process. If anyone's had a submit a expense report that spends more time doing that than it does actually making the charges on your expense expenses that's a problem, right? What are the systems, the things behind the walls that you don't actually see, like plumbing and electricity.”
3. Lore
“Those are the unspoken or sometimes spoken stories that the organization tells about itself. And sometimes that is intentional, right? From leadership or from marketing or communications. Sometimes it's water cooler talk that senior leaders and executives don't know. What we found was organizations (who had thriving cultures) were really intentional about shaping and influencing that”
4. Rituals
“The things that we do as an organization that highlights or embodies the brand. So an example in the book we give is NASA's pumpkin carving contest. It's grassroots, it's not paid by government taxes, you know, tax dollars. It's all subsidized by the employees. Their pumpkins are really crazy, some of 'em actually lift off and explode”
5. Vocabulary
“Vocabulary is the being intentional about the language you use. So Netflix is really famous for this. They have a bunch of internal words they use, like “sunshining”, which is when you share a failure so that the rest of your team can learn from it. Or the “keeper test”, which is for managers. If you have an employee whom you would fight to keep, if they were gonna leave, then they should be on your team.”
6. Artifacts
“Infusionsoft, which is now Keap, has a football field like AstroTurf in their office, and that's for one of their values – “leaving in it all on the field” And so they have staff meetings on this AstroTurf as a reminder for people to leave it all on the field. So that would be an artifact.”
Design experiences and processes that reflect the company’s values
When culture and brand is reflected in the experiences and the processes of the company, it can be so powerful. The same can be said when nothing is reflected – powerfully terrible.
“No one really thinks about organizational systems as part of their brand, right? But if your expectation is you want a nurse to have great bedside manner and be efficient and super smart and be like an operator, a Navy seal essentially…Yet every interaction with the software and HR and parking is a nightmare, that is gonna bleed out into the way they interact with doctors and with the way they interact with the patients and what information they put into systems and which ones they don't.”
This is also especially true for younger generations, who are more and more part of the workforce.
“Generation Z and millennials have have really good BS meters, right? Whereas older generations, it was duty, tradition. And so there's this cultural shift that's happening right now. And so we gotta be transparent. We have to have a brand that isn't just, you know, paint on the outside of our building, but is something that actually is an expression of who we are and how we operate”
Mark also reminds us that it’s not just the big organizations who can walk the talk, aligning values to action.
“The barbershop that I referenced in, in my book Nico’s barber shop, is they, they take I think once a month time to do haircuts for those in need, right? So sometimes it's a like a, a boy's home, sometimes it's a homeless shelter. Sometimes it's low income people who are, are getting interviews like, or sometimes it's teaching kids how to do barbershop haircuts and all that kind of stuff. That has generated rapid, rapid growth - from a haircare product line to multiple stores.”
Indeed, purpose driven branding, a core idea from David Aaker remains very relevant for organizations big and small.
Conclusion
You can’t rip culture apart from the brand. By addressing the cultural challenges head-on, you give the brand a boost in authenticity, laying the foundation for a brand that’s going to fulfill its promise every single day.
Learn more about Mark:
Ways I can help you:
Subscribe to Healthy Brand Mondays: Leverage brand thinking to accelerate your growth
Download free guides and tools: Learn from my years of experience as a brand strategist
Work with me: Be a podcast guest or hire my services for your brand