Sdfsdfsdf

Corporate culture

4imprint.com

Corporate culture: Where brand meets people

If the past few years have taught businesses anything, it’s that a brand cannot be manufactured or its messages always controlled. Branding, now more than ever, is about the people—your customers. It’s in their hearts and minds that brands exist and it’s their experiences and perceptions that can make a brand succeed, or fail. “Building a brand today is very different from building a brand 50 years ago,” says Tony Hsieh, CEO of online retailer, ZapposSM. “It used to be that a few people got together in a room, decided what the brand positioning was going to be, and then spent a lot of money buying advertising telling people what their brand was. It’s a very different world today.”1 Status updates, tweets, check-ins, reviews—these are the things your brand is made of. A customer’s outstanding experience with your business (or their worst customer service encounter ever) can be communicated to millions of people practically instantaneously. As such, the Internet, mobile Web and social networking have led companies to become more transparent, whether they like it or not. So how are businesses adapting to this changed landscape? Many marketing professionals and leadership teams, including Hsieh’s, believe the answer is in corporate culture, arguing that brand and culture are two sides of the same coin. “If you get the culture right, most of the other stuff—like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers— will happen naturally on its own,” says Hsieh.2 To do this, businesses should take a strategic approach by understanding how corporate culture works and why it’s important, and then moving to create goals and adjusting current practices and messages, both internally and externally, to best align the culture with the brand. In this Blue Paper®, we’ll take a look at these topics, as well as a few case studies. If your business is...