Living the Brand

How to Transform Every Member of Your Organization into a Brand Champion

Nicholas Ind

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780749452803
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Your company's workforce is its most valuable asset. It is the employees who translate your organization's strategy into reality, interact with consumers and determine the corporate brand. Living the Brand demonstrates how you can empower and enthuse your employees to create "brand champions". This approach enhances employee commitment, improves service standards and focuses efforts to deliver business goals.This practical, inspirational book shows you that employees flourish in organizations where they identify with the brand, and organizations flourish when the brand has relevance and creates meaning.Using original international case studies, such as IBM, SAS Airlines, UNICEF, Apple and Nike, Living the Brand shows you how to make this happen, through research, training, communication, management and review. It examines the nature of branding and why people have become such important definers of their brand. Living the Brand is a CarbonNeutral® publication. To offset the carbon dioxide emissions generated in the book's production, native trees have been planted with Future Forests.

1 I’m genuinely feeling groovy

Meet Chip Bell: 11 times world freestyle Frisbee champion, occasional surfing instructor and receptionist for outdoor clothing company Patagonia. Based in Ventura, California, Patagonia is an organization with a very distinctive culture. Not only does it employ a world Frisbee champion to answer the phone and greet people – it also has a clear philosophy, born out of the organization’s earliest days. This is a $267 million turnover company (2006), where the founder and chief executive conducts job interviews while surfing and employees are trained to abseil from building tops unfurling environmental protest banners. A company where workers leave their desks for the beach when the waves are over six feet and where the stores have been picketed by the Christian Action Council. It is a powerful brand that has a demonstrable commitment to quality, an idiosyncratic point of view, devoted customers and devoutly passionate employees. It has an influence, particularly in the United States, far larger than its size would suggest and serves as a model for how business can have a genuine and positive impact on the environment. Patagonia is a standard bearer for an ‘employee centric approach’ that stresses the value of engaging people with the organization they work for and stimulating them to live the brand.

The story of Patagonia

Yvon Chouinard, a French Canadian who grew up in Burbank, California, founded the company that became Patagonia in 1958. As a young man he was a keen surfer and climber. He also taught himself to be a blacksmith. Using his forging skills, at the age of 18 he started out in business making climbing pitons for himself and then selling a few to friends. This was a job that required absolute precision. Produce a flawed piton and you endanger someone’s life. It was not surprising that the young Chouinard had an early obsession with safety and quality. That obsession remained as the company’s range of products grew. However, for Chouinard, the business retained a hobbyist culture, albeit a passionate one. The company’s first mail order sheet in 1966 noted ‘Don’t expect speedy delivery in the months of May, June, July, August and September.’ This was when Chouinard would close down the forge and go climbing. Winter deliveries could also be interrupted if the surfing was good. Despite this whimsical approach to business, his passionate beliefs helped to galvanize the company and by 1970 it had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States. This was when Chouinard had his first crisis of conscience. After climbing a peak in Yosemite, called El Capitan, Chouinard recognized the damage that climbers were doing. Pitons have to be hammered in and out of cracks, which disfigures the rockface. On well-trodden routes the environmental damage was clearly noticeable. Chouinard decided that he should set an example to others and he pulled out of the piton business and instead began offering aluminium chocks that could be wedged in by hand. These had long been used by British climbers but were virtually unknown in the United States. Chouinard became an evangelist for ‘clean climbing’. The 1972 catalogue contained a 14-page essay on chocks by climber Doug Robinson, who noted, ‘Clean is climbing the rock without changing it; a step closer to organic climbing for the natural man.’

In the mid-1970s, the company moved out of climbing equipment and into outdoor clothing, but the personal philosophy of Chouinard remained a dominant influence. As with climbing gear, Chouinard’s clothing was highly engineered and built to last and there was a distinctive commitment to environmentalism. There was also an ethical stance that encouraged putting principle before profit. This created a corporate culture that was and is against consumption for its own sake. The notion of in-built obsolescence would be anathema to Patagonia. The company actively encourages people to send their clothing in to be repaired when damaged – generally for free – rather than encouraging replacement purchases. Of course, there is a contradiction here in that Patagonia does persuade people to buy its products in the first place and to experience the outdoors – both of which create environmental damage. Chouinard sometimes bemoans the overuse of the wilder areas of the world and the despoliation that occurs but the company tries to have a positive approach to the environment. For example, when Patagonia was concerned about wasting the scraps left over from the pattern cutting of garments, it created a range of children’s clothes from the offcuts. The pieces were oddments so nothing matched, but customers liked the story behind the idea and the range was a success. Most organizations would have capitalized on this, but Patagonia capped its sales and refused to produce additional product to meet demand. Chris Van Dyke, Marketing Director at Patagonia, says:

As a small company we have the leverage to move a large company, because we don’t compromise. That creates an incredible power, grossly disproportionate to the revenues we generate. Yvon has always known that being a business model is a huge reason to grow. He’s always said that if you do the right thing you’ll make money and you also become more powerful.

The environmental cause

Just as Chouinard was an early proselytizer for clean climbing, Patagonia has always been an advocate for the environment and for persuading other businesses of the importance of environmentalism. This is a company that is not short of opinions and is quite happy about the divisive effect they can have. By having a clear point of view the company creates a closer bond with its customers and employees. There is a sense of active participation in an important cause that matters not just to Patagonia but has the potential to influence the way that people live. This is a campaigning company with a campaigner’s zeal. Fostering this seems to be related to the nature of the company’s business and the way in which it was founded. Climbing, like many of the outdoor sports with which Patagonia is connected, involves much waiting and then a burst of adrenalin-filled activity. Waiting for salmon to bite, waiting for weather to clear and waiting for the surf is when stories are told. Then, because of the blurring of the boundaries between Patagonia and its climbing, canoeing and surfing customers, the stories get retold in Patagonia shops; they get retold in Ventura where employees are passionate sports people; they get retold in advertising; and they get retold in the catalogue in the form of field reports. Here’s Gretel Ehrlich, a canoeist, writing from the field:

I am lying on a sled on the frozen strait just off Cornwallis Island in the Canadian High Arctic. The sun is out; it’s always out in May. I’m at the camp of an American seal biologist, Brendan Kelly. We have just been through a three-day storm that almost blew us away. Our water-closet tent vanished first, our food cache is buried deep, our insulated tent is leaning hard though the wind has now calmed. All that is left is ice and light.1

This dialogue generated by the relationship with customers is interesting because it is something that happens naturally when companies are small and the managers of a business interact with their customers through their day-to-day work, but it is often hard to sustain as organizations grow. Managers become removed from the day-to-day realities of a business and as a consequence they lose the direct dialogue and the sense of identification. As Larry Keeley of the Chicago-based innovation consultancy Doblin Group says:

What they’re managing [executives] in their heads is an abstraction – some thing they remember from their one day out in the field in 1968. Or an abstract understanding of what they think they want a programme to achieve.

People within Patagonia maintain the dialogue naturally because their interests are their customers’ – employees are both the producers of goods and active consumers. Stories flow into the company anecdotally or in writing and then flow back out. The stories are not designed to directly sell more products: they’re much more to do with building a deep sense of identification with the soul of a sport – for the people ‘who know the difference between winning and achieving grace’.

Creative Director Hal Arneson says:

We have our songlines2 – they’re passed on and they’re very seldom written down. They run through generations and they extend out into the customer base. We definitely include our customers as part of that tribal culture.

Patagonia is not afraid to involve its customers in what it does. One of the contradictions is that the output of the company is the production of expensive garments largely made from carbon-based, non-renewable petrochemicals, which take thousands of years to degrade. Rather than trying to rationalize this dilemma internally, the company raised the issue on the web and asked people what it should do. A cynical attempt to build support for an impossible situation or a genuine desire to involve its customers? The history of Patagonia would suggest the latter. However, whatever the motivation, the request generated a lot of comment and helped the company to decide that the only solution was to build clothing of the highest quality while causing the least possible harm in doing so. The view was that the better the quality, the longer the garment would last. Instead of a one-year fashion purchase a product should have a 10-year-plus life at the end of which customers could return it so that the base layers could be recycled, generating significant savings in energy and CO2 emissions compared to creating fibre from new material.

In 1996, nearly 40 years after Yvon Chouinard first started blacksmithing, the company decided it should formally articulate its overall purpose and values. This wasn’t about creating something new, but was about drawing out and defining the philosophy that had long steered people’s behaviour. A cross-functional group of some 30 people talked about the company and its beliefs and came to the following definition.

Our purpose (where we mean to take the company):

To use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

Our core values (the characteristics that define the company):

Quality: pursuit of ever-greater quality in everything we do.

Integrity: relationships built on integrity and respect.

Environmentalism: serve as a catalyst for personal and corporate action.

Not bound by convention: our success – and much of the fun – lies in developing innovative ways to do things.

Typically for Patagonia the purpose and values were given context by writing a 28-page book called Defining Quality, which talks through the history of the company and recounts the seminal moments in its development. As suggested in the purpose statement, environmental concerns loom large in Patagonia’s thinking. This is not a tool to create a point of distinctiveness, but something that is a genuine principle. For Patagonia, environmentalism has long been part of the lifeblood of the company and, given the nature of the company’s products, something that Patagonia’s people encounter in a very direct way. The benefit to Patagonia is not so much in the marketing of products, as Patagonia feels uncomfortable with the very idea. Chris Van Dyke, who joined Patagonia from Nike, says:

When I joined, Yvon was very anti-marketing, but I presented marketing to him as a way of relationship building; a way of creating a friendship…the great thing is it’s a culture that is so rich in stories.

The real value of environmentalism in an organizational sense is that it is the glue that binds the organization. It engages the people who work for the company and it is a clear aid to decision making, such that when both tactical and strategic decisions have to be made there is a clear reference point. People simply have to ask themselves: ‘Are we being true to the brand?’ The more precise the brand idea the easier it is to use it as a means of accountability. In particular, the greater the authenticity of the brand the easier it will be for the organization to be consistent, especially when confronting adversity. For example, the Patagonia catalogue is always printed on chlorine free and recycled paper. Yet when the paper for a summer catalogue arrived at the printer it was an unusable batch. There were only two possible alternatives available for such a large print run. One was a paper that passed the environmental standards that Patagonia set, but was poor for reproducing photographs. The other paper contained chlorine and was not recycled, but was a high-quality material that was very good for reproduci...