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Company Focus: Brand and Culture

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

When brands engage employees and customers in co-creation, how do you still maintain your company focus and keep your integrity and vision intact? Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point Creative, and Ken Meyers, president of Panorama Foods, discuss the benefits and pitfalls of the human element of brand building.

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Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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Building a Sustainable Brand

Connecting Messaging to Customers

The Power of Co-Creation

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For decades, brands were pushed down to customers. The company had all the control, and customers were, for the most part, passive. That’s not the case anymore. Companies no longer have that amount of control. Company leadership can’t decide unilaterally what a brand is going to look like, what it’s going to stand for, what that message is going to be. Now any number of people, both internally and externally, most of whom the company doesn’t control, are going to be contributing to that process along the way.

So what can you control? This is where company focus can be an extremely helpful tool. When companies can identify who their target is in a very laser-like way, they can create relationships with people who are very symbiotic to the relationships and values and promises that that brand wants to be.

In this way, the brands are not trying to spread themselves too thin, especially early on before it’s been established. Once they begin to scale and grow, this can help to cut down on the number of people coming in and commenting on, or co-opting a brand who are not really the target audience. If people are talking about the brand but it’s not for them, then it can be easy to quickly lose control of a brand and lose control of the story that’s being told about it.

Company focus, therefore, becomes critical to building a strong brand. Many founders think of focus as losing opportunity. Instead, focus becomes a way to attract the right opportunity and get access to the right audiences who will support the vision for a brand instead of fighting against it or undermining it.

Brand Culture: The Power of Co-Creation with Ken Meyers

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

How do you make getting your employees to live out your brand culture a “want-to-do” instead of a “supposed-to-do” for your team? Ruth Lund, President of the Legacy Center, Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point Creative, and Ken Meyers, founder of the Smartfood brand, discuss how to successfully develop a culture of advocacy instead of a culture of compliance.

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Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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The Human Element

Action, Not Ideas

Culture Is Credibility

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Ken points out that if something is pushing down to a group of internal stakeholders, employees, partners, vendors, it is less likely to be absorbed and embraced than if it’s something that everybody has had a hand in developing.

“If people can feel even a shred of ownership in something that is meant for them to follow, it becomes a want-to-do, as opposed to a supposed-to-do. Supposed-to-do things are rarely a hundred percent right. Want-to-do things are much more likely to get to universal application,” Meyers explains.

This engagement and ownership is extremely valuable when you are trying to create a brand that is nurtured and sustained by a culture that is aligned with the messaging a company is trying to get the rest of the world to embrace.

Often visionaries create companies with a mission that is so important and so meaningful to them that sometimes they forget that the process of buy-in means letting other people into that vision.

This doesn’t mean that the company turns into a democracy where everyone has a say in what the vision of the company should be. That would undermine the clarity and consistency needed for effective brand and culture building. Instead, it means allowing other people to take the vision and look at it from their perspective or their role in the company or as a customer. When companies and brands can achieve that kind of co-creation and co-ownership, the relationship becomes much stronger.

Company Mission Statement: Action, Not Ideas

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

When companies are trying to set the tone for both team culture and their brand positioning, there is often a lot of time spent wordsmithing their company mission statement. Ruth Lund, President of the LEGAY Center, and Ken Meyers, President of Panorama Foods, discuss how Ken’s early experience pitching the Smartfood brand relates to crafting a mission statement that really matters.

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Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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The Human Element

Culture Is Credibility

The Power of Co-Creation

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Ken told the story of when he and his partner were in the throes of developing the business plan for Smartfood popcorn. The business plan said that they were going to generate a million dollars in revenues in the first year. Then Ken would go out and talk to people and try to get them to buy into our vision and support it and write checks. Investors would ask, “How do you know you’re going to do a million dollars?” His response would be “because it says so right here in the business plan!”

Ken’s point with this story is that there are altogether too many people who think the same way when they develop a company mission statement or create documentation around what their culture is or is going to be. They spend a lot of time wordsmithing it, and then put it in a binder or on a website, and they think that their job is done. But the reality is that all of that thinking is really only as good as the actions taken behind it.

As Ken said, “You can write anything down, you can think anything up, but if it is not followed through on, if it is not really injected into the blood of the organization, such that it becomes a living, breathing mission, a living, breathing set of mile markers and guard rails, that everyone has absorbed internalized and cleaved to then it’s up no real value.”

Employee Branding Strategy: The Human Element

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

In a transparent and interconnected world, the people in your organization are critical contributors to (or potential detractors of) your brand messaging. What brands are getting it right? Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point Creative and Ken Meyers, president of Panorama Foods, discusses an employee branding strategy and the benefits and pitfalls of the human element of brand building.

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Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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Culture Is Credibility

Action, Not Ideas

The Power of Co-Creation

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Brands work hard to develop messaging that captures how they want to be known, but the actual customer experience often falls short of the promises. Meghan cited REI as an example of a strong external brand that is also backed up with the actual experience with their employees in their retail stores. Their employees are outdoor enthusiasts who can speak to the products from their personal experience, and they stand behind their products. They truly live out the promise that REI puts out into the world. In many ways, the experience of shopping at REI is even better than some of the messaging or promises that they put into the world.

This is incredibly important because any one of the representatives of a brand, from the CEO to the people who come in and clean the building at night can have an impact on the brand. Everyone now has a say in the reputation of the brand. Comments and reviews can either be a fantastic asset support bed for what a company is trying to build, or it can be a fire in the building.

The quest to try to manage a brand reputation through an employee branding strategy really has to be distributed out to all of the human points of contact in an organization and beyond, including those who you can recruit as supporters and advocates for your brand. Everyone will see how a brand’s representatives behave and how closely that aligns with the message that you are trying to build and support in the marketplace.

Brand Reputation: Culture is Credibility

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

Where do brand and culture intersect? Ken Meyers, creator of the Smartfood popcorn brand, talked to Meghan Lynch, CEO of Six-Point, and Ruth Lund, President of the Legacy Center, about culture as the credibility backing up your brand reputation.

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Ken Meyers

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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The Human Element

Action, Not Ideas

The Power of Co-Creation

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Meyers thinks of brand as essentially a promise to the marketplace, to the prospect of constituents, and a company’s culture is the credibility behind that promise. As Ken said, “You can say whatever you want to, but if your company’s activities, behavior, and attitudes run counter to that brand promise, it’s going to be seen, and it’s going to chip away at the credibility behind what you’re trying to get people to believe and follow.”

As companies grow and scale, the transparency that companies experience with their customers acts like rocket fuel. It can propel a company to new heights, or it can blow them to smithereens. It’s next to impossible to hide disconnects between the brand promise and the actions of the people in the company, or the company itself. There are so many ways that customers can share information about their experience with others, and that those experiences can be found by others. If the alignment is there, that clarity and consistency will reinforce customer confidence. If there is misalignment, it will undermine the brand reputation of the company and make it impossible to build brand loyalty and equity.

Meyers also pointed out that the company culture is what is going to set the course for either rapid growth and expansion of a brand or ultimate brand collapse. If you do culture right, you set solid boundaries and guardrails and you stay on the path toward growth. This gives you the best chance of getting people to buy into the promise you make with the brand reputation that you are trying to develop, and the best chance for success.

Culture Evolution: How to Manage Stretch Gaps

by | Oct 23, 2020 | Team Culture, Video

Can you truly change a culture? Ruth Lund of the LEGACY Center and Robert Glazer, bestselling author of Friday Forward, discuss whether or not culture evolution is possible when a company begins to outgrow its core values.

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Robert Glazer

Meghan Lynch

Ruth Lund

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Rewarding Key Behaviors

Trust Your Spidey Sense.

Think. Say. Do.

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There are times in a business lifecycle when gaps start to appear between where an organization is and where it is headed.

Glazer points out that most organizations know their vision when they start, because oftentimes the founder is trying to do something specific. It’s difficult to truly develop the core values of that organization until you have at least 10 people and you can identify what values your best people reflect.

When it comes to articulating your core values, Glazer says, “They shouldn’t be aspirational and they shouldn’t be table stakes, like integrity or stuff like that. Where, because you wouldn’t hire someone who has integrity. They’re trying, they’re trying to represent that differentiated point of DNA.”

Oftentimes, the core values of an organization do not change as they grow and scale, even when their goals and tactics do. For example, if a company is doubling every two years, the CEO might need to change behaviors, systems, and goals to adapt to that change, but it is likely that the company values will not change. In fact, the company will grow more efficiently if it grows in service of its values instead of around its values.

But every once in a while, there might come a time when the values of a company do need to evolve through a culture evolution.

In those times, organizations will acknowledge the cultural DNA that has served them well, but also identify that they need to expand some of their values in a way that is authentic. This culture evolution will not happen often, but it can be a huge opportunity for next-level growth when there is a readiness in the organization for an authentic values stretch.