Brand Identity And Culture

An Instant Guide for Entrepreneurs

Guy Rigby

• Publisher: Harriman House
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780857191854
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

This eBook is about brand identity and culture - it is a guide for entrepreneurs.The author of this instant guide from Harriman House, Guy Rigby, has also written From Vision to Exit, which is a complete entrepreneurs' guide to setting up, running and passing on or selling a business.

Brand Identity and Culture

“Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit … then also the business must die, for it no longer has a reason for existence.”

— Henry Ford

Creating a meaningful brand

In the modern world of consumerism and enterprise, we are fast developing an immunity to brands. Information overload and incessant marketing have desensitised people to brands and the messages they churn out. Today’s business must therefore be smart when creating its brand identity and culture. Successful brands must be associated with memorable and evocative feelings, with a purpose, a personality and clear values.

Profiting with purpose

Brands are about capturing hearts and minds. If you want your brand to be noticed, you’ll need a purpose that people will embrace and buy into.

Both internal culture and external identity begin with purpose. Why are you in business? What do you stand for? What is your function and relevance in society?

Purpose shapes the vision and values of your business – the inherent promise that you make to your staff, customers, suppliers and partners. It also defines the mission and the strategy, guiding your actions and behaviours. Ultimately, these combine to create your culture and brand identity.

While businesses need to make profits, that’s not their only purpose. Yet businesses with a strong purpose often end up making the biggest profits:

• Apple’s purpose is to innovate, to create a positive user experience and design aesthetically pleasing products.
• Google’s purpose is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• Gap’s purpose is to make it easy for people to express their personal style throughout their lifetime.
• Skype’s purpose is to revolutionise telecoms by providing an alternative via free and low-cost calls over the internet.
• Smith & Williamson’s purpose is to help people create, manage and preserve their wealth.
• The Body Shop’s purpose is to support community trade, defend human and animal rights and protect the planet.
• Avon’s purpose is to “empower women one woman at a time to learn how to earn”.

The importance of values

Liz Jackson, MD of Great Guns Marketing, has recently had her logo redesigned to reflect how they’ve moved on as a business. But branding, she says, is not just about imagery and logos. “For me branding is not really what we look like, it’s more about who we are,” says Liz. “For me, brand is more like the blood in your body that pumps around, it says so much about your company. It’s how you answer the phone, your values and your culture.”

Values – what you stand for – affect how you are perceived, how much custom you bring in, how your workforce perform and, ultimately, how successful your business will be.

In the rest of this chapter we’ll look at how your purpose and values can attract customers and unite your workforce. We’ll also consider how they can benefit the wider community, adding to the success of brands that act both ethically and responsibly.

How to attract customers

People buy from people, but they also buy from brands that they trust. Brands create trust in many ways – through product or service excellence, creativity, reliability, safety, value for money, etc. They can also build trust by establishing reassuring familiarity (which comes through raising brand awareness) and through affinity. The main way to create affinity with a brand is to make sure it stands for something.

Values are a set of ideals, attitudes and ways of doing things. They are indicative of a company’s purpose – what it stands for. They enable people to see how a company ranks the importance of certain things, positioning the company according to its values and, in turn, attracting a following that relates to and concurs with those values.

As Brad Rosser, formerly of Virgin, says: “the company rather than the individuals should become known as expert and become well-known for whatever it stands for, so it becomes a ‘come to’ business.”

Becoming ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Publishing details
• Praise for From Vision to Exit
• About the Author
• Preface
• Brand Identity and Culture
• From Vision to Exit
• Other Business eBooks From Harriman House