Discovering Your Personal Brand Culture

As business owners, we spend a lot of time on marketing our brand. We lay out different marketing strategies, tapping different channels to find consumers.  But some of us might be too focused on marketing alone, attracting and converting consumers to loyal customers.

Brand culture is a balance of your business goals, vision, mission, values, and beliefs mixed together. You walk and talk your brand, that’s your culture. This mix is important to a business because it’s the one thing that will define and separate you from your competitors, a culture that the owner, manager and its employees live with. A strong brand culture will easily attract consumers who believe in your values and how you do business. It is seen as an important driver that can make a business successful. It is flexible and adjusts well to consumer trends. If you have a great product or service, don’t let that go to waste because you have no clear vision of what your business is about.

As a personal brand, creating a culture around your brand means being clear and committed in your core values and non-negotiables (those things that are essential to who you are, what your business is, and what you will not compromise on).  You should start from within. Start with the things that you have control of, like the way you run your business, the way you handle your employees. Start internally.

Here are some tips on how you can discover your brand from its core to make it into a culture:

An energetic and engaging leader – the right attitudes make a culture. If you show that you are energetic and passionate about what you do, this will rub off on those who work with you. Become an example to your team. Make your products and services a part of who you are. As a leader, inspire your team by engaging them into the realities of your business. Help them see what you want your brand to be known for. This will make them understand what your business is about and how you want others to see your brand. Once they get a clear idea, their attitudes will adjust to what your business needs. They will be happy to talk about your products and offer amazing customer service when they reach out to customers.

Put your values into action – now that you have set values for your business, you have to consistently live by them. Your team members or employees will have a hard time living by company values if they only hear and read about it. For maximum impact, you have to put your values into action. Let them see how you work and they will follow. Create a lively environment where you can live by your brand values. Empower those who work with you so that they can embody your brand culture.

Clear roles and accountability – businesses who have established a strong culture recognize how important their team members or employees are. They are part of why a business is growing. As a leader, you have to recognize their talents. This will serve as another way to inspire them. Give them clear roles and let them know what is expected from them and what they are accountable for. By empowering them like this, they will understand how important their work is and start living the brand’s values. When you are hiring, you can also look for people who already share your interests and have an understanding of what you are doing for you business. This will make it easy to establish a culture.

Acknowledge success and failure – every business faces challenges and whether you get through that or not, you are left with a lesson. Remember to celebrate your business’s success even if it’s a small thing. Give credit to those who helped you reach that goal as a way of letting them know that their efforts are valued. If you take care of your people, they too will take care of you no matter what happens to your brand, even when you suffer a bump along the road.

Brand culture is important because it is what separates you from the others. If you have a well established culture, it is harder for you to completely lose balance in the business world. It’s never too late to start defining who you are as a brand. You can start discovering and establishing your culture from within.