Wednesdays is my usual Toastmasters meeting at Adobe. I mentioned to a few in my Twitter community this morning that I would be posting on this later and I received a nice, very intriguing, and challenging reply:
Ah…good question Elliott. First, to the contents of my speech, and then a little bit on how that is related to Elliott’s question.
Most advertising agencies refer to the first step of the branding process as an audit. I’ll simplify this down a little bit to three steps, which are actually quite involved:
1) Perception: manage your outside perception and develop your self-awareness.
I talked a little bit about my personal branding effort from some weeks ago by doing an “adjectives” survey. Companies can do this too: ask people what they think. Also, you can look at your self or your company and figure out what you think are your adjectives. This brings together a nice melding of the two, but it takes a lot of time and careful thinking.
2) Presentation: How can you package this story? I’m on this part of my process right now. I was in Hayes Valley earlier this week and craving some color, which I found at a local clothing store (I will post a picture of my fave fabric soon).
Color, graphics, stories, all this creates the presentation and packaging of your brand.
3) Promotion: This is the development of your network and partnerships which you can ally with, and that can relate to your brand. I think the best organization that does this well from my knowledge is Ladies Who Launch, because as a group of women entrepreneurs, they develop their brand as individual businesses but also work together in partnership with each other to create a brand advocacy network.
Now, a brief comment to Elliott’s question.
“How do you build the right company culture to support your company brand?” I think this is a little bit complex because the brand should have a strong story to start with so that all employees can relate to it on a human, emotional level. But, if you are going through a re-branding effort, it’s certainly more challenging to restart something. You have to go through the process again and re-evaluate the company and develop the story that employees can get involved with and make stronger through their work and their efforts. In both cases, it is important to have a solid foundation and to have people working solely for this purpose.
There is an amazing company out there, called Three Ringsthat makes Puzzle Pirates, a fun strategy game for people with 10 minutes of free time between meetings. Three Rings instilled the brand of their company by investing in the interior design of their office to look like the inside of a pirate ship. Now, that’s an innovative way to tell your company story and what you are all about. Even the CEO dresses up like a pirate, which is partly a tribute to his British heritage (they like to dress up a lot in the UK), but a lot about making this gaming company’s culture fun and creative.
Now, to open up the floor: for those of you who have your own businesses or have a hand in the intrapreneurship of branding of your company where you work, comment on what you find as the best organizational behavior structure to build and maintain a brand.
