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Brand Culturalization

Reaching for your gun? Don't. Brand culturalization pays. Honest.

Brand cult: Fitness

Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, Nokia, Intel, Disney, Ford, McDonald's and AT&T. The world's top 10 brands, according to Interbrand, a consultancy.

What's peculiar about the list?

That 9 out of 10 are American brands? No. That figures. American businesses were the first to take Peter Drucker seriously when he said that business is essentially about making money by fulfilling consumer needs. And is, therefore, marketing.

That 3 out of 10 brands started as acronyms for long unwieldy names? Heck, no. But that should get you close to the answer. And the answer, according to Ajay Gupta of BrandProphet, a brand consultancy, is that all 10 are not just brands, but corporations. Corporations that came to be recognized as consumer brands (Coca-Cola is an exception, having gone the other way round).

Why should it matter?

Because a brand is something of an iceberg. The 'brand personality' forms the visible part, but it is the larger 'brand character' below that determines long-term success. And character building, as BrandProphet has it, is largely a function of 'brand culturalization'.

If that sounds suspiciously like the fashioning of a company culture to meet specific objectives, you're bang on. It is. "It is a transformational process," says Gupta. A process that involves the reshaping of attitudes and aptitudes. The whole idea is to get employees so motivated by the brand's values as to bring coherence and consistency to their job interactions. They must live and breathe the brand, so to speak. So a Reebok employee, for example, must not only be fitness-crazed herself, she must transmit the buzz to everyone she meets.

"Everyone in the organization and their associates must act in favour of the brand vision," says Gupta. The vision could vary, of course. Different brands have different ways of charting out the 'spirit of the future' they'd like to see. Reebok envisions a world of fitness. Nike, a world of victorious doers. A vision could be more prosaic too. Cellphone service Orange foresees a wireless world where everyone has a personal number that goes everywhere in life. Butterfly, on the other hand, focuses on free-float possibilities.

But aren't businesses too busy these days chasing cash to bother with any of this? Most businesses, yes, sighs Gupta. "If CEOs were complaining it was QSQT - quarter se quarter tak - it's actually much worse, day-to-day... aaj sale kitna hua?"

Yet, companies aren't entirely oblivious to the idea of working long-term. In practical terms, brand culturalization involves working on people outwards in, using the classic marketing model of concentric rings: from symbols to role models to rituals to core values (in descending order of crackability). What's more, by BrandProphet's own brand culturalisation model, all this change must be effected in three complete spheres: functional, social and emotional. "In the end," says Gupta, "you have to align the organization's goals with their personal goals."

The result? Employee loyalty, and through it, customer loyalty, which more than pays you back over the customer's lifetime. "Loyal customers buy more, pay more and advocate more," says Gupta. "It's a friendship, from the heart. Most decisions are taken from the heart - so you're in the business of heart share."

That, really, is the tricky part. The heart share challenge is rising inexorably, and at a pretty fast clip, even as you read this. Add the emergence of the so-called 'experience economy', and you understand why Gupta is so keen on brand culturalisation. Even in regular businesses, the service component is growing all the time, with more and more companies finding themselves in direct contact with the customer. Disintermediation, of course, is to be welcomed. It empowers customers, but only at the cost of lousy marketers.

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