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:
“We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)