The Marketing Book 5th Edition

Visible artefacts

Values

Basic assumptions

Supportive

or

constrictive

culture

Brand vision

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Envisioned

future

Purpose

Values

Culture

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Artefacts

Values

Assumptions

Brand building 387

Organizational culture can act as a ‘glue’
uniting staff in disparate locations to act in a
similar manner. It can motivate staff and,
through coherence of employees’ behaviour, it
can help engender a feeling of consistency
about a brand. Furthermore, a strong organiza-
tional culture can increase the level of trust
stakeholders have in a brand, encouraging
better brand performance.
Organizational culture can be analysed at
three levels (Schein, 1984), as shown in Figure
15.11. The most visible level is to look at the
artefacts that reflect an organization’s culture.
This would include the office layout, manner of
dress, the way people talk, any documentation,
the firm’s technology, etc. While these data are
relatively easy to collect, they prove challeng-
ing to draw inferences about why a group
behaves in a particular way. Seeing an open-
plan office layout may indicate the firm’s belief
in open access to information, but it may also
suggest a concern about cutting costs.
A better appreciation of people’s behaviour
comes through understanding values. However,
people can publicly exhort espousedvalues, yet
behave in a manner which indicates an addi-
tional set of core values. To better understand
the concealed reasons for behaviour, there is a
need to dig even deeper into the basic assump-
tions people hold. Individuals have mental
maps, or schema (Huff, 1990; Schwenk, 1988),
which are the rules they have formed to make
sense of their business environment and to

predict outcomes, given certain factors. For

example, some managers might have as their

basic assumption that increasing advertising

leads to higher levels of awareness and therefore

greater sales. By contrast, other managers might

have as their basic assumption that advertising

works by building a reservoir of goodwill and

that all is needed is just to have a continual

trickle of expenditure to keep the pressure head

of goodwill above a critical level.

By undertaking an audit of the organiza-

tional culture, then evaluating this against the

brand vision, as shown in Figure 15.12, the

appropriateness of the current culture can be

assessed and changes identified. One of the

problems though is that the shared mental

model (cf. assumptions) of managers may

engender resistance to change. A period of

‘unlearning’ (Bettis and Prahalad, 1995) has

been suggested by writers, whereby the team is

taken away from the office (leaving the incor-

rectly supporting artefacts) and they work with

consultants to recognize the weakness of old

assumptions and formulate more appropriate

assumptions.

Setting brand objectives

From the brand vision should emerge a sense of

direction for the brand. To transform the brand

vision into quantified objectives, it may be

helpful to think of a two-stage process. A long-

term brand objective is set, which is broken

down into a series of shorter-term objectives.

Figure 15.11 The three levels of culture (Schein,
1984)

Figure 15.12 Assessing the suitability of the

current culture