Culture vs. Marketing: How to Build a Brand People Trust

One of the most basic principles behind a successful company is sharing the word about your product. If you asked the average person how to achieve healthy awareness, most likely they would say, marketing. In part, this is true. Good marketing is a key component of how your audience will receive your brand and product but even if you have the best marketing team in the world there is something else you need to make it balance out. A strong company culture often gets overlooked when it comes to the power of your brand’s image. 

 

1. What Is Awareness

In order to grasp the balance between culture and marketing, we first need to examine our goal. What are we trying to achieve? The goal for your brand is to be known and for your audience to be aware of it. 

To dig deeper: You want your audience to recognize your brand when they see your logo and to be able to recall who you are and what you do for them. 

If you are a vacation rental company who rents cabins in the Smoky Mountains, you want your name to be the first to come to mind when they are thinking of a place to stay. Awareness is key to your company’s success; it’s also the goal at the heart of marketing. However, is marketing alone enough to achieve it?

2. The Idol of Marketing

In 1985, Coca-Cola, one of the most successfully branded companies in the world, launched a product called “New Coke”. They poured millions of dollars into their campaign for the product. Unfortunately, a lot of time, energy, and “New Coke” was wasted. Customers hated the product and begged for the old formula to come back. This is an example that even the greats can fail at a marketing campaign. Coke was able to recover and is now doing better than ever, but their one mistake could have led to the downfall of the empire they worked so hard to build because they assumed that a strong marketing campaign could convince customers to like their product. 
Marketing has become a bit of an idol in our modern age, and it’s not without reason. It is a tool that can change the way a product or service is viewed and can make the difference between success and failure. However, if there is not a strong foundation on which marketing can stand, your trust in marketing alone will let you down. In the case of Coke, they had a great campaign but not such a great product. 
Your company needs legs to stand on; and what might those legs be? A lot goes into creating a firm foundation for your business, but one of the most important legs is your company’s culture.

 

3. The Importance Of Culture

Building a healthy, thriving culture can be a challenge. It isn’t something that you plan for in a weekend and then consider it taken care of. Your culture will take years to build and you have to constantly be working on it, steadily, one day at a time. Essentially, “we did what we said we would do. We acted how we said we would act.”
When you have developed a strong culture, your company will thrive, and here’s why: 

A strong culture will turn into better products, more productive employees, and, most importantly to this article, word-of-mouth advertising.

Seth Godin once said, “The secret to marketing success is no secret at all: word of mouth is all that matters.” To an extent, this is true. Of course, there are always more nuanced pieces to the puzzle, but ultimately, the way your audience views and talks about your product is the most important part of your advertising and the best and most trustworthy word of mouth comes from your own employees. 
If your company culture is strong, your employees will spread the word and bring about a positive opinion of your brand and your product. On the other hand, if you have a poor company culture, your employees and customers spreading negative things about you can heavily impact the way you are perceived. Your culture matters to your sales, even more so than your marketing.
 

4. What Do We Do About It?

Culture is more practically defined as “here’s how we do things around here.” If we are struggling to do what we say, then we need to focus on fixing that before we spend more money advertising that we do it. The best way to find out what your customers think about you is through your reviews and complaints. Focus on fixing actionable feedback from your customers (whom you have already spent advertising money on to procure). Disgruntled customers who are won back through good customer support can often become your biggest cheerleaders and return customers.

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