4 Ways to Integrate Brand and Culture

Integrating brands and culture is about knowing market trends and how to create and recreate our products and services to make sure that they will stick with consumers.   

Brand and culture was a focus of a recent #brandchat discussion.  Think about how our products and services can help consumers; turn the want into a need. It’s not easy but there are ways now to easily get feedback from consumers to help improve business. Creativity and innovation to integrate brand and culture will help your business compete in the tough market. The market is always evolving and consumers jump from one new thing to another, but if we can establish our brand with culture, make it consistent, then consumers will have something they will never forget.

Here are four ways on how integrate brand and culture:

Become an icon – this is not easy but if you dream big, you will set business goals to reach that dream. A product becomes iconic when people start talking about it and spreading it to others. You have to find ways you can create and invest in establishing a culture around your brand. Make sure that everyone in your company lives up to your mission and vision because they represent your brand. If they do a great job in providing customer service, customers will have a memorable experience and will surely come back for more. Same with your products and services, if they feel that you truly live up to your ads, they will have a brand that they can trust and will come back again. In integrating brand and culture, make your employees happy and they will be happy to serve everyone too.

Work on your niche – If you find your brand’s niche, work on that. If you work on your brand consistently, people will start talking about it until it becomes a cultural figure. If you can tap into the emotions of your customers, they will not forget it. Take Apple products; they are now the leading makers of cool gadgets. That’s right, cool gadgets. And their products are not just physically designed to be cool, they are built to process and make computing really convenient. They have iPods, iPhones and iPads. A lot of critics say that these are just toys, but Apple is proving them wrong because a lot of professionals are taking iPads to Boardrooms, the office, and everywhere else, especially iPhones.

Create something that is culturally influential – one way to make your brand culturally influential is to know what your consumers want. If you can create something that has everything they want in it, and then a few extras, the want becomes a need. Your advertising should be aligned with the quality of your products. Once consumers can trust your brand, they will be loyal and spread the word to others. Take RIM’s Blackberry vs. the iPhone. Blackberry started the smartphone craze and everyone doing business has to have  one. Blackberry lets you do emails on the go, Internet when you need it, everything to make a businessperson’s work easier. Now Apple tapped into that with the iPhone, a touchscreen smartphone. It’s not just for business either because there are so many apps you can use, depending on your needs. A lot of people are making the switch because they can do more with an iPhone.

Create a strong branding campaign – this point might mean more money for marketing, but there are tools now that will help you get your brand out. Create a marketing strategy on the Internet, make use of social media sites to attract and interact with your target customers. Through these sites, you can post images, videos, and stories that are related to your brand, something you can use to make an impression. Ford has a blog site that accepts stories from their customers about how a Ford product helped them or inspired them. These stories get published in the site, no marketing whatsoever. But the site gets around and so does the brand.

What do you think? Perhaps you’re a BRANDido (people who chat on #brandchat weekly) even if you’ve never chatted with us on the chat – chime in here!