How to Build a Brand Culture

Culture eats brand guidelines for breakfast (brand advocates > brand compliance)

Nov 19, 2024

It’s a brisk Tuesday morning in Vancouver, BC, my working location for the week. Life-wise, I’m rug shopping (we’ve got a cold, sparse house in Oakland right now, please send recs 🆘) and debating what to make for Thanksgiving dessert—pumpkin basque cheesecake? Pecan mochi cake? The famous apple cake from Winkel 43 in Amsterdam? (This recipe looks promising.)

Work-wise, to close out 2024, I just opened one last cohort for my Maven course, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders, which kicks off mid-January. Enrollment is open—and Maven’s doing a pre-Black Friday sale this week you’ll want to get your hands on (unless you’re using up your L&D budget—then support a girlie).

You’re here because you recently subscribed or signed up for one of my resources—my course waitlist on Maven, lightning lesson, or Notion templates.

If someone sent you this post and you’re not subscribed, join those people learning how to tactically advocate for brand at your company. 📬

Last weekend I had dinner with a friend who recently started a new role as a brand strategist at Apple (she’s amazing). She was telling me how little time is wasted on debating things like what makes good advertising, “should we do a campaign,” should we invest in brand or growth, what goes in a brief. They figured all this out a long time ago.

While Apple’s resources dwarf most startups’, that’s not the real difference. Most startup marketing teams waste 90% of their energy on alignment questions and internal debates. I’ve seen it repeatedly across my career—alignment is at the root of everything a company either succeeds or fails at. But it’s hard to quantify, so it often gets ignored.

I’ve said it before: The strength of your brand is a direct reflection of your internal alignment. Your brand is only as good as your team’s shared understanding and vision; extreme alignment is exactly why Apple’s brand is so good and why startup leaders constantly reference Apple’s website for inspiration (lol, please stop doing this).

Most discussions about brand focus on the external—logos, campaigns, messaging, and market perception. But the strongest brands are built from the inside out, through cultures where every employee understands their role in shaping the brand experience.

When you walk into an Apple Store, or message Stripe’s support, or interact with any Disney cast member, or get the lowdown on new items from a Trader Joe’s cashier, or witness any Southwest flight attendant turn safety instructions into entertainment, you’re experiencing strong brand culture in action. These experiences don’t happen by accident—they emerge from organizations where brand thinking is as natural as thinking about customer service or product quality.

Scaling a brand culture beyond the founder

First, a note about founder-led brands, since that’s where many of us are coming from today. I’ve spent most of my career working with them—from Notion to Brex to Gusto—where I’ve seen firsthand how founders shape their company’s brand identity, for better or worse. In a recent post, I focused on earning founder buy-in, which is often the first hurdle for brand teams in these environments. But ultimately, sustainable brands need to grow beyond their founders.

Here’s what I wrote a few weeks ago about the founder-brand dynamic: “The moment a company or product exists, you have a brand. At day zero, the company’s brand is the founders’ reputation. When early employees join, their experience becomes part of the brand. When investors come in, their logos become part of the brand. When a product is released, the UX is part of the brand. Any media coverage, any customer service interaction, any error message, any Glassdoor review—all part of your brand.”

Founder-led brands are unique, where the founder’s role is critical to the brand's early development (and can sometimes be the cause for delay).

But if your company is successful, it won’t really be a founder-led company forever.

And if a founder is successful, their company’s brand (and team) can stand on their own even when the founder takes a step back.

10 Brand Rules for Founders

Kira Klaas

August 27, 2024

Read full story

What is a brand-led culture?

A brand-led culture is one where every employee understands, values, and actively contributes to building and maintaining the company’s brand. It’s when brand thinking is woven into the fabric of daily operations, decision-making, and company strategy—not just relegated to the marketing department or founder’s vision. Alignment around the brand, why it exists, who it’s for, and why everyone comes to work every day, is a basis for that culture forming.

You’ve probably heard sales or revenue leaders say “everybody works in sales.” It’s a powerful way to align an organization around growth—helping every employee understand how their role contributes to the company’s success in the market. The same should be true for brand: everybody builds the brand, whether they realize it or not. Every customer interaction, every product feature, every social media comment, every recruitment conversation shapes how people perceive and experience your company.

In a brand-led culture:

Brand metrics are viewed as company-wide success indicators
Employees at all levels understand how their work impacts the brand
Teams naturally consider brand implications in their decision-making (not as an afterthought or “design layer”)
Brand consistency emerges organically rather than through enforcement (no need for “brand police” ✋🏼 more on that below)
The company’s values and brand values are unified (and clearly understood)

Building a brand culture across your org

While gaining founder buy-in is likely a near-term goal for many brand operators, our long-term goal should be creating a company-wide brand culture. This is how I think about extending brand understanding and advocacy beyond just the founder, or even one dedicated “brand person.”

1. Create accessible brand guidelines & resources

Develop comprehensive yet user-friendly brand guidelines and a centralized repository of brand assets that all employees can easily understand and apply in their work. This means:

Clear, practical guidelines that explain not just what but why
Easy-to-find templates and assets (and you don’t reinvent the wheel every time)
Regular updates and communication to keep resources current
Examples of both good and ~ suboptimal ~ brand usage

2. Incorporate brand training in onboarding

Partner with your People team to make brand education a key part of the new employee onboarding process. Instead of continually playing catch up, you’re ensuring that every new hire understands the brand’s importance from day one. Ways you can do this:

Include brand training in onboarding:
- Add a 30-minute brand session to new hire orientation and/or create a “Brand 101” self-paced learning module
- Include brand guidelines review in first-week checklists
- Have new hires complete a simple brand exercise (e.g., identify on-brand vs. off-brand examples)
Provide role-specific brand application examples
Recognize and reward great brand advocacy in Slack (kudos channel, All Hands, etc.)

3. Customize brand training for different teams

Same as you tailor your approach to the founder, customize your brand guidance for specific teams. Sales will have a different relationship with and use for the brand than Customer Support does; don’t risk anyone’s eyes glazing over by delivering the same spiel to every team. I’d start with these:

Conduct listening tours with different departments (don’t forget about Legal or Finance!) and make sure you’ve identified at least one “delegate” on each team who’s excited about partnering and can help make sure the rest of the team gets your docs/resources/meeting invites, etc.
Create role-specific brand application guides
- For Sales, you’re likely focusing on sharing pitch decks and customer stories or case studies that nail the brand voice. For product, it might be a library of UI copy that exemplifies the brand tone (and what doesn’t).
- For PMs: Documentation/product update guidelines—these can be such a huge brand asset, just look at early Slack! Or The Sims, lol.
- For Recruiters: Job description templates and branded interview questions
Host team-specific lunch & learns and leave time for Q&A (or an activity!)
Keep building those relationships through regular cross-functional partnership or check-ins, invite those partners to join relevant brand discussions
Proactively communicate brand team SLAs

4. Align the brand with company values

It’s a huge pet peeve of mine when a company has 4 sets of “values” (company, brand, product, design principles, etc.). 🤡 Your goal should be for the brand to closely tied to the company’s core values, if not synonymous.

This makes it easier for employees to understand and internalize the brand as part of the company culture. Fewer semantics, fewer things to remember. Avoid that and instead:

Align brand values with company values, or at the very least with design values/principles and any customer-facing values
If you have values articulated, regularly reinforce value alignment in communications
Make sure your values documentation includes examples of how values translate to customer-facing brand touchpoints

5. Integrate brand metrics into OKRs and growth goals

More company metrics are brand metrics than not: Repeat purchases (amount and frequency), acquisition cost, share of search, organic traffic to your homepage and brand search traffic, and pricing power are all indicators of brand value.

The Brand vs. Growth Myth

Kira Klaas

September 5, 2024

Read full story

6. I am begging you, 🚨 don’t 🚨 be the brand police

I hate the phrase “brand police.” We’re not here to slap wrists; we’re strategic partners in helping the whole company tell our story consistently and compellingly. It’s about building something great together (a culture of brand!), not enforcing rules.

How do you make teams feel like your partner? Some ideas I’ve seen work well:

Give regular updates on brand metrics and success stories in all-hands meetings
Create open Slack channel(s) for brand questions and discussions (or weekly tips or examples) or host regular office hours for Q&A or quick reviews, depending on the size of your org
Focus on education and enablement rather than enforcement
Help people understand why brand governance matters (a little lunch and learn can go a long way)
Quarterly brand workshops focusing on different aspects (voice, visual, strategy)

So much of building a brand-led culture comes down to alignment. And when you think of alignment as a measurable and tangible part of your job, it’s easier to invest the time and set the intention to get to know your stakeholders (even in the face of constant demand to ship and execute) and the ways the brand can serve them.

Remember, customers don’t care about your internal structure. Your brand, product, services, sales, and customer support should make up a unified front, regardless of how your teams are organized.

The most successful brand-led cultures are those where the brand becomes self-sustaining—where it’s no longer dependent on any single person, whether that's the founder, the brand team, or anyone else. 🍎