Phase Two – Living the brand

Building the foundations is only the starting point of the continuous, iterative process of brand building. The real work starts when the planned identity needs to be built into the corporate culture and communicated outside of the company to form the image in stakeholders’ minds. Many of the interviewees emphasized the importance of building the brand inside-out, first targeting the founding team and then indirectly through them the external stakeholders. MP2 explains how fundamentally important it is for the team to strongly believe in the brand them-selves.

The startup has to find that positive psychosis and you need to start believing the thing or how the character is [brand persona]. In branding you need to recognize the groove and it is enough if you believe in it yourself. (MP2)

The brand needs to be rooted in truth and resonate with the founders because if they don’t believe in it, the customers won’t believe in it either. MP2 points out that often the brand builder is his own worst enemy because they mistakenly

Brand Book

Culture Guide Graphic Guide SoMe Guide Event Guide Visual Identity

Brand Story

1. Honest 2. Original 3. Relevant 4. Humane Core Message

Supporting messages Website headers Values

Vision & Mission Purpose

1. Contribution 2. Impact

think that they are building the brand for the customer and not for themselves.

MP2 explains that ultimately the internal branding will bring you to a situation where there is no need for getting together to discuss brand decisions in market-ing meetmarket-ings when everybody in the company has the gut feelmarket-ing about what is on-brand and what is not. Getting there, however, does not happen overnight and now we will take a closer look into the process of brand implementation.

MP5 explains that before the brand is launched outside of the company, a lot of work needs to be done to achieve strong buy-in from the founding team. This is important because if the people inside the company do not behave according to the externally projected brand when they interact with outsiders, their credibility will suffer. MP5 tells about the importance of engaging the whole team in the brand building process.

I think it is equally valid in startups and big organizations that if you build a brand then as many people from the organization as possible should participate in the process. People have a need to be heard and if they have not been heard it will be very difficult for them to buy-in later. So even if my idea did not lead to the final result, at least I was heard, and I got a chance to tell, I got to vote on this.

That participation binds the people and it is the first step in getting internally the backing of the whole team. (MP5)

SF1 tells that in their company this issue is handled so that the brand manager takes care of building the brand together with the branding agency, but he always goes through the decisions with other founders to gather comments and to gen-erate the needed buy-in.

Internally the main mechanism for spreading on-brand behaviour throughout the company is to build the brand into the corporate culture. SF1 says that the consumer’s image of the company is a reflection of the company’s corporate cul-ture, which indirectly influences the corporate brand. MP5 explains that the cor-porate culture needs to fit the real-world context in order to be perceived as au-thentic.

Is it conservative design or is it uber futuristic and so on. All this needs to be reflected in how the corporate culture is. Most likely a law firm is not in this uber futuristic world because that culture would not resonate with the people in there so it would be inauthentic. When you start building the brand it always needs to match with the real world. (MP5)

SF1 describes the gradual development of the corporate culture in their company as a process of reacting to opportunities keeping the brand first in mind and then adopting the best approaches into their corporate culture.

As we advanced, we did things and recognized if they were according to our values, if they felt nice to do and if they were appealing to our customers, so then we adopted them as part of our brand-canon. (SF1)

Another way that the culture was developed in the company of SF1 was through brand experiences, originally designed for the customers. These brand experi-ences guided the staff to on-brand behaviour as they were exposed to the same elements that were originally designed to evoke brand-related feelings and be-haviour in customers. SF1 gives an example of this sort of brand experience in their restaurant.

We wanted to repeat around us the same feeling that we had in the beginning. It influences everything, for example that in our restaurant the food was shared so that we could create shared moments when people need to ask for and hand over food. (SF1)

MP5 agrees that the key element in brand implementation is repetition. He points out that in order to attain the higher-level goals set in brand manuals, vision and mission, the brand needs to be brought down to the operational level where peo-ple work every day.

So what does this mean in practice in my job? If you are a salesperson then how does the brand show in your work, how do you contact people, what kind of presen-tations you use, how do you present them, face to face or through skype. You need to make clear what this means in the real life. (MP5)

SF1 admits that it might not be possible to implement very complex things throughout the whole organization but still the abstract thinking is an important part that should be continuously kept up. He believes that the things that people need for doing their job are the simple guidelines and purpose-built environ-ments that unconsciously guide the people into doing things according to the brand. SF1 speaks of implementing the brand on the practical level by crystalliz-ing it into simple and catchy taglines.

We aim to make sentences that can be repeated. For instance, the “Elevated Hu-man Connection” has a phrase “Dream and dare together” connected to it. You can see that you have succeeded when people do something and see that it is “on brand” and then says out loud that this was exactly this “dreaming and daring”

(SF1)

The importance of successful brand implementation on the everyday level lies in the fact that it is the staff of the company that interacts with the external stake-holders, which makes them the brand’s interface towards the outside world. SF1 explains that the goal in their company has been to get the brand know-how as close as possible to the touch points where the customer meets the company. If the people operating in each touch point know what kind of image they are ex-pected to transmit, the customer experience will be more unified and consistent.

When the brand has been successfully implemented throughout the company from the abstract level of brand manuals into the practical level of touch-point behaviour, it is time to think of how it will be maintained as the company grows.

Both MP5 and SF1 acknowledge that recruiting decisions are a crucial part of managing the corporate culture of a growing startup. MP5 advices to recruit peo-ple who share the company values as they will fit right in and start contributing to the wanted brand image since day one.

Then the thing of how are we keeping the brand in line, we get to the recruiting decision that are we hiring just anybody or do we take people who buy our why, buy our values and slide right in and when someone from outside meets this new guy, the brand image will be consistent. It comes precisely from inside. (MP5) As the company grows it needs to be careful with the recruitment decisions and instead of only hiring the talent with the highest substance capabilities, they should primarily hire people who have the correct cultural fit.

Teaching the substance is much easier than rooting the culture and value system.

The set of values means everything because it has a direct influence on the corpo-rate brand. (MP5)

A practical example of the recruitment process was given by SF1 who explained that during the interviews they strictly state their values to the applicant and in-form them that they are expected to commit hundred percent to those values if they are hired. This procedure can help filtering out applicants who might not feel a strong connection with the brand.