Both the concepts of “culture” and “strategy” are not new. What is new is that these two concepts are used together. Because we have always heard that culture eats strategy for breakfast[1]. In other words, when the two of them get into a duel, culture will always win. Maybe because we accept that culture expresses a status quo and therefore something that cannot be changed (or can hardly change), this thought seemed very reasonable and logical to us. However, there is no need to clash culture and strategy in a way that makes them hurt each other; both of these phenomena just need to be designed rationally. Today, it is necessary to realize the power of the multiplier effect that occurs when culture and strategy work in harmony with each other. This is possible with our Strategic Culture Design model.

When we accepted that companies such as countries, cities, towns and villages also have a culture, things started to reach a slightly different dimension. The interesting thing is that the concept of culture, which is much older than a brand strategy for companies and institutions, is included in the equation so late. When we consider Kuru Kahveci Mehmet Efendi, we are talking about a Mehmet Efendi who sells dry coffee and his business culture. In the periods when brands matched with people, people were also equated with culture and many elements (values, rituals, etc.) in it. Over time, marketing and advertising professionals have separated the brand from this equation. They defined marketing as at least shaping perception, if not lying, and convinced people that packaging matters more than content. Those who took things much further here claimed that somehow people’s subconscious can be dominated by hidden elements in the logo and advertisement. A concept called “subliminal” has entered our lives. Maybe this perspective would have continued like this for a while… Maybe companies would believe that keeping the showcase beautiful for a while, no matter what was inside, would bring results and they would manage their brands in this way. For example, he could hide the damage he has done to nature by painting his logos green (YN: Here the author is referring to the term “Green Wash”). However, just as Nassim Nicholas Taleb is based on in his book Black Swan, the impact of the seemingly improbable (COVID-19) enabled many things to transform rapidly. Unlike others, I like to say “I told you so”; I had stated in the expectations for the new year published in Marketing Turkey in 2018 that brands should become more sincere due to the strengthening and transparency of communication. The pandemic, on the other hand, has become a catalyst here, as in many other things.

At the point we have arrived at, first of all, we need to change our perspective on the brand. Brand; It is a multidisciplinary system consisting of culture, brand strategy and customer experience. This system, on the other hand, has to be designed from the inside out, not from the outside in. You cannot serve food that is not cooked in your kitchen in front of your customers.

The Rise of Cultural Design

Cultures, like brand strategy and many other strategies, can be retrofitted. The method is both simple and difficult. It’s simple because designing the sub-elements it has is enough to design the culture. It is difficult because the application is like performing a surgical operation without anesthesia. Everything has to happen in consciousness. For companies, culture is a living organism whose basic building block is human.

On the other hand, there are many limitations in practice. For example, it is very difficult for a company with a status quo culture to create a libertarian brand. An organization can’t have fun creating a strong and successful brand in an area that leaves no room for error. Just like Kuru Kahveci Mehmet Efendi, who does his job carelessly and sells stale coffee, cannot create a brand that lives for 150 years…

Culture has two “customers”, so to speak. One of them is the consumers who experience the interior culture as reflected in the products and services and are aware of it even if they do not experience it thanks to the developing communication tools. A culture that “prefers to lose money rather than lose people’s trust” does not and cannot make a bad dishwasher. No one can call the crazy ideas of Lego workers “nonsense”. The most important contribution of culture to the brand strategy is to make the value proposition, which is the reason for customer preference, credible. This is the reason for the recent social responsibility gluttony; corporations think they can shape their culture with ostensible confessions and make a living out of it. What a pity.

The second customer of culture is insiders, employees whose search for meaning is increasing day by day (and peaking in this period). This increases the importance of employer branding.

The Rise of the Employer Brand

In our research on the Changing World of Meaning of the White Collar[2], which we conducted at the beginning of the pandemic, a father said: “We have been at home for a while. The pandemic has had a huge impact on me and my family. Recently, my mind stopped when my daughter came and said, “Dad, you are a very good person”. It turns out we missed a lot of things.” This example may sound so unrealistic to you, I know; hard to believe but true. A little more, a little more, we all found time to stop and think about what we missed.

We are now living in what Microsoft describes and envisions as the “Great wave of resignations[3]” (research from March 2021 indicates that more than 40% of current employees will change jobs within a year). The pandemic has changed business conditions and methods; needs redefined. Because of all this, the role of HR rose rapidly and came to a strategic point. In the past, HR was an operational rather than a strategic part of the business. He was even a “payroll” in some of them. On the other hand, this transformation had to be experienced to increase the importance of the employer brand. As the number of HR people on the boards of directors increases, practices regarding employer brand and culture will also increase.

This extraordinary experience we have had for more than a year has had a significant impact on the lives of our employees. On the other hand, the rapid increase in the importance of the subject paved the way for symbolic and ostensible practices devoid of infrastructure. Do not worry; Just because you wrote “We are a family” on the walls, your employee does not see you as his father. Just because you have organized a training once a month, people do not feel in a learning and developing organization.

At this point, corporate communication and HR will need to do much more together. HR professionals will have to learn brand and communication, corporate communicators will have to learn talent management. Employer brand strategy will be one of the most important issues of the new period.

[1] “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” by Peter Drucker

[2] The White Collar’s Changing World of Meaning, Goodjob Human Insight & Brand Strategy, August 2020

[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work and https://www.marketingturkiye.com.tr/haberler/buyuk-istifa-hareketi/

Culture Doesn’t Have to Conflict With Brand Strategy yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

How Does a Brand Consultant Contribute to Company Growth? yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Brand Consulting Optimizes

The most fundamental benefit of a brand-consulting service is that it optimizes branding processes and marketing activities. This optimization takes shape when several dimensions work together. Because the resources of brands — and of the companies that own them — are not infinite, spending those resources so as to achieve the most productive result is the most basic benefit of this work. That is also why brand consulting requires producing results that are specific to the brand and suited to the brand’s own world.

1. Setting the Right Brand Strategy

A brand grows stronger in the light of — and by giving direction to — the business strategies of the company that owns it. Making the right decisions for a strong brand, and keeping those decisions consistent, is not a matter unrelated to strategy. What brands choose matters as much as what they choose to give up. Determining the right strategy across every area — product strategy, pricing strategy, channel strategy, and communication strategy above all — also creates efficiency inside the company. R&D, for example, can focus on design rather than sheer efficiency, and spend more of its energy and money there.

For instance, the strategy we created for a food brand we worked with defined exactly what should be on the menu — and what could never be on it. In time this became a guide for the company’s employees as well: people could turn down alternatives or opportunities that came their way simply by saying, “This isn’t right for our brand.” That is a big advantage.

2. Finding the Right Business Partner

The second most important benefit of brand consulting is finding, among the hundreds or thousands of business partners in the marketing ecosystem, the one that fits the brand best. Every brand and every brand’s needs create different truths. For this reason, a brand consultant evaluates a partner’s work not by personal taste but within the framework of the strategy — and the agency, in turn, is more confident that its work will be judged correctly.

3. Giving the Right Brief and Reading the Result Correctly

For example, in a brief we once gave to one of the best-known corporate-identity design studios for a brand we were about to create, there was a statement like this:

“The logo needs to be orange. Because no competitor in the market uses this color — and at the same time it fits the brand’s strategy and personality very well.”

In the end the studio produced six alternative corporate-identity designs, and every one of them was orange. The studio focused its creativity on the logo’s other elements and offered different shades of orange as the alternatives. The logo that was chosen — and the brand that was created — is this one.

4. Making the Right Investment

In the end, every decision made and every piece of work done for a brand is an investment, and that investment draws on many limited resources — money, effort, and time above all. A brand-consulting service ensures this investment is made in the most correct way. Ideal consulting in any field, in essence, protects people from risks and unnecessary costs; and a good brand consultant returns far more than the fee they are paid.

One Condition

There is a single condition here. Brand owners taking on a service that might be considered a “luxury,” like brand consulting, should not treat it the way they would service at a restaurant. Brand owners and everyone working for the brand must be aware that they are one team — they should feel as though they are building a wall together. Because a brand consultant can guide you with their ideas and experience, but they can never know your brand better than you do, nor manage it better than you can. In other words, it is simply not possible for them to know your business better than you do.

What Does Brand Consulting Add to Your Brand? yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Let’s bring this a bit more into everyday life with a car example. To someone standing still, a car doing 100 km/h flashes past; but to someone travelling in another moving car, that same car is perceived as going much more slowly. In other words, a car’s “perceived” speed changes according to where you look from. In physics this is called “relative velocity.” Here we see perception contradicting reality, because an object’s perceived speed varies according to where we observe it from and can differ from its real speed.

This theory of relativity (that is, relativeness, or relativity) holds in every area of life. For example, when we watch a remote indigenous tribe, we see that they own far less than we do and sometimes feel sorry for them. Alain de Botton produces a wonderful thought on this: he says that we are in fact far poorer than they are, and always will be. The basis of this idea is that a person’s poverty has to do with their knowledge of the goods around them, how much of them they want to own, and how much they actually own. Whatever we own in the modern world, there is always something one step beyond that we want to own — and we are in a race. The indigenous people, meanwhile, expect from life only what they already know.

Let’s look at the three figures above and try to determine which circle is the biggest.

The circle in the middle of the leftmost figure looks the biggest, and the one on the right the smallest, doesn’t it? Yet in all three figures the middle circle is exactly the same size. It is simply that the sizes of the circles around it change how we perceive the size of the middle one. Almost all of our thoughts and perceptions take shape relative to a reference point. We might put it this way: if you want to look more attractive, then instead of wearing more makeup or having cosmetic work done, you could try not surrounding yourself with people better-looking than you. That is, by changing the reference point, you can look better.

We can also grasp how far relativity carries us from reality — and how much perception deceives us — with an experiment we can do at home. First, place three bowls in front of you, wide enough to put your hand in. Fill the first with cold water, the second with room-temperature water, and the third with hot water. Put one hand in the cold bowl and one in the hot bowl, wait a while, then plunge both into the room-temperature bowl: one hand will feel it as hot and the other as cold — even though the water touching both hands is the same water at the same temperature.

The environment a person lives in also creates different reference points in them. From the moment we are born, the knowledge and experiences we acquire build up a certain store within us, and that store becomes a reference point on many subjects. We describe the Chinese (and, in fact, all Far Eastern peoples) as “narrow-eyed,” while they perceive Europeans as “round-eyed” (I suppose that is why the characters in Japanese cartoons always have big, round eyes — that is how they see us; and when we caricature East Asians, we draw their eyes as lines). In fact there are three different shapes of this “narrow” eye, and they perceive the differences among themselves very well. But because of the environment we were born into, we perceive our own eyes as normal and theirs as narrow. Another example of how a person’s living space affects perception and reference points is the way people who live in big cities perceive their living conditions: they earn more and spend more, and their sense of what is “normal” shifts accordingly.

The experiences and knowledge we acquire create different reference points on almost every subject, and these reference points help shape our perception in new situations we meet. Air travel is a good example. Journeys that once took 8 hours by road were shortened by about 90% with the airplane, dropping to as little as 1 hour. Seen this way, the improvement is, relatively, tremendous, and everyone ought to be delighted. But over time people get used to flying, and their expectations about travel time change to match. Today, when a plane is delayed by an hour, or when people are kept waiting as they disembark, frequent flyers protest far more than first-timers — because for them the shift from road to air travel is psychologically complete, and the old reference point, travel time by road, has lost its validity. So the experiences each of us has with a product or service also create a reference point, and relativity comes into play.

The sense of taste, for example, is underdeveloped up to a certain age; afterward it completes its development and, like every sense organ, begins to age. That is why children tend to like sharp, pronounced tastes (hamburgers, ketchup, chocolate, and so on). But as a person grows older, they begin to taste other things too (broccoli and cauliflower, for instance). In old age, the sense of taste tires and draws less flavor from food. That is why older people happily eat some foods young people cannot stand at all. Of course, the “experiencing” we mentioned earlier is an important factor here too: we more easily accept tastes close to ones we have had before.

Let’s come to marketing. As we know, brands offer a promise. In offering it, they aim to differentiate from rivals and to answer a certain need of the consumer. Positioning theory comes into play at exactly this point. Dan Ariely, in his book Predictably Irrational, says this on the subject: “Most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context.” It can be said that people grasp something faster, and decide faster, when it is shown to them within a comparison. This is used, when a category is just forming, to explain what gap the category fills and which need it answers. Recall the toothpaste-on-an-egg example. In it, part of an egg is brushed with toothpaste and then soaked in vinegar water; as a result, the part brushed with Colgate stays intact compared with the unbrushed part. The vinegar-soaking method makes people’s minds work within the framework of relativity and, by creating a reference point, turns the wheels of positioning. The aim of such ads was to increase the tooth-brushing habit and to make it easier to grasp what benefit the product offers. The softened part of the egg symbolizes the “unbrushed tooth” and is in a far worse state than the brushed part. We know that a human tooth would never actually soften like that egg, but the comparison creates a very strong perception in us.

The same logic aims to persuade people to use a dishwasher. Using numbers while doing so makes it even more convincing. Knowing that you use twice as much water washing by hand matters more than knowing exactly how many liters you use and how much money that comes to — because there is a reference point. It is grasped and learned more easily.

One of the most important things that makes being first in a market matter for brands is the chance to become a reference point. We spoke earlier about how the perception of taste differs by age; we have a reference point for tastes, too. Just as tea tastes more flavorless after we have eaten honey, the products we have tasted before shape our perception of later ones. Cola is a good example. Cola was produced by Coca-Cola as a wholly chemical, artificial drink, so the reference point of the cola market is that product. Other colas are always compared with Coca-Cola, and to the degree they resemble it they are seen as successful, and to the degree they differ from it, less so.

The new product is clearly stated to be X% better than earlier versions. What is mentioned is not an absolute value but a value relative to the old one. Sometimes the product used as the reference gives up its place in the market to the product that is X% better; sometimes the two products are positioned toward different audiences and both go on existing in the market.

In the same way, many brands try to persuade consumers with ads that compare their own products against products they describe as “ordinary” (bleach, dishwashing-liquid and laundry-detergent ads work this constantly). This way, they do not give the consumer the chance to weigh the product within the frame of its own features and price. The consumer’s mind decides by comparing the product’s value (and, in fact, its cost) with the rival product’s value. Although this comparison sometimes feels to us as if it took a few seconds, it is the outcome of a complex, multi-functional equation. The brand perception built up to that point also forms the basis of the purchase decision.

For instance, we know that an A-class washing machine consumes less energy than a B-class one, and we care about that. This relativity is enough for us to understand that the A-class machine is more valuable than the B-class one — but we still have no idea how much more valuable. We come to understand that, too, only by seeing the alternatives and comparing.

Brands use people’s relative thinking in retailing as well. When you walk into an electronics store, for example, you get to see many televisions side by side. When I used to visit such stores, I would notice that some televisions really had a very poor picture, and I would think that set had no chance at all — so I found it pointless for it to be there. But now I understand very well that the real aim is to sell not that TV but the one next to it. What is being attempted is to make the poor-picture TV a reference point, because that way a person perceives the set beside it as far better.

The comparison should be easy, because consumers prefer not to compare things that are hard to compare. Most brands make this comparison in its simplest, clearest form, leaving the consumer little time to think. In it, highly persuasive numbers sometimes do the talking, which lets the consumer see the brand’s advantages more clearly and shortens decision time.

The ad below is for Remington’s shaver, the Remington 60. In this ad, shot in the 1950s, we get to observe advertising in its most rational form. It explains that the new shaver is better than the old one, making both a surface comparison and a comparison of blade length — because the perception in men’s minds here is clear: more blades means a better shave. And even today, men’s razors go on equating a better shave with more blades.

Again in the 1950s, in the ad Broxodent made for its motorized toothbrush, relativity is used very effectively — it claims to save time by cutting a task down to just 4 seconds.

I would guess that in the days when products’ physical features loomed larger than what they made you feel, relativity formed the basis of positioning and of advertising. Over the years, much in marketing has changed and many new concepts have appeared. But even today, presenting a brand or a product to people within a context is the most effective way of getting it perceived — and positioning is one of the most effective methods for creating that context. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.” In marketing it is the same. The one thing people want is a place to stand — a footing, a reference point that will make their decisions easier.

Positioning and Relativity | The Brand Age | 2013 yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.

Goldfish Leading School — Image by © David Aubrey/Corbis

My dear friend and business partner Eren Özata once wrote an important piece on a similar subject (The 2.5 Rule in the Brand Game). As he noted there, the roles of leader brands, challenger brands, and follower brands (or brands — that is, “the others”) all differ.

The Consumer Chooses the Leader
You do not become a leader brand by declaring “I am the leader.” The consumer decides who the leader brand is, and this is an important point in leader brand strategy. In the world of computers, IBM is the leader; in mobile telecoms, Vodafone; in dairy, Danone. Neither they nor their rivals can claim otherwise — to do so would be absurd.

What a Leader Does

• Tells consumers its philosophy of life and lets them dream.
• Leader brand strategy is geared toward developing the category.
• Tries to solve the problems of the sector and to be the pioneer of change within it.
• Brings its strengths and the areas rivals cannot reach to the fore (for example, the unmatched subscriber base that only the market leader holds).
• Studies the product and category moves of rivals carefully and responds in a fitting tone. If a new product or service is involved, it develops it without losing time, using its size advantage to keep rivals from getting ahead.
• Continuously produces new products and services.
• Produces “know-how” for the sector.
• Tells success stories; it feeds off its past.
• Tells dreams about the future; it feeds off the future.
• Tries to solve social problems, acts responsibly, and shows that it gives part of what it earns back to society.
• Appears in the biggest and most eye-catching way, wherever it should be seen.

What a Leader Does Not Do

• Does not signal to consumers that it cares about the rival, and does not respond to jabs. In its communication materials and press statements it does not name or imply the rival, does not sit at the same table, and does not step into the same ring. For example, when a challenger runs ads daring the leader into a head-to-head comparison, the leader simply does not show up to that fight.
• Flaunts its size but is not arrogant (depending on the sector, a little swagger is fine).
• Does not strain to be seen everywhere. Where it would appear smaller than, or behind or below, its rival, it does not appear at all.

So while leader brand strategy looks like this, what do the following brands do? That is the subject of another article…

Have a great weekend, everyone — and Goodjobs!

Leader Brand Strategy yazısı ilk önce Goodjob Brand Consulting üzerinde ortaya çıktı.