Brand culture is a company culture in which employees "live" to brand values, to solve problems and make decisions internally, and deliver a branded customer experience externally. It is the desired outcome of an internal branding, internal brand alignment or employee engagement effort that elevates beyond communications and training.
A brand in order to be relevant to consumers and sustainable over time must operate much like a culture. A company must develop an ethos and a worldview that it absolutely believes in and then should act in accordance with it. Everything the company does - every product or service it offers, every public statement, advertisement, website, internal policy, memo and business decisions it makes must be congruent with that ethos and worldview.
If the brand truly represents an ethos and worldview which are attractive to consumers they will embrace the brand as part of their own identity. They will join the brand culture and participate in that culture as a way of expressing to the rest of the world who they are and what they believe in.
An Apple iPod stands for a courageous, inventive, rebellious and audacious approach to life that make every iPod user proud and give a badge of identity. It stands for the Apple way of doing things. Harley Davidson has created a rich body of meaning and embodied that meaning in a system of symbols and actions. This is the Harley Davidson brand culture - belief, passion, excitement, commitment etc.
When consumer connects to a brand that aligns with their most deeply held beliefs and sense of identity they are essentially both pulling that brand into their own world and entering the world of that brand. The vital thing for any organization is to create this world for its consumers. The value of brand culture comes out when companies give its consumers something to believe in.
Famous quotes containing the words brand and/or culture:
“Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”
—Robertson Davies (b. 1913)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)