Companies Must Discover Corporate Culture as the Foundation to Effective Marketing: Marketing and Culture are Inseparable

Marketing: Communication of your ever increasing value and impact to your clients, prospects and your marketplace over time.

Corporate Culture: In a nutshell, a company’s culture is identified by all communications that take place inside and outside the company. They include communications between the management, the employees and all their friends and family, spreading to customers, suppliers and associates of both. Any and all communication is duplicated and repeated many times by the people involved. The sum total of all communications defines corporate culture.

Unintentional Corporate Culture Diminishes the Value of Marketing

Culture as described, is often in conflict with the expensive, carefully crafted and communicated marketing messages. Because of this, the marketing message loses much of its power and credibility. This is why many of your perfect prospects don’t buy from you.

Communication is Usually Inconsistent

In the typical scenario, employees say certain kinds things to their bosses. They say different kinds of things to peers, still different things to subordinates, and different, things to clients. They say still other, different, things to family members and friends. This inconsistent communication creates a veritable cacophony of mixed and varied messages producing confusion in the marketplace, no matter how carefully the “formal” marketing messages are created. The “informal” messages are continuously and naturally transmitted through “portals” of interaction, so many, in fact, that they actually overtake the intentional, “canned” corporate message.

As a result, it doesn’t matter what your brochure says. The culture is already communicating some louder and clearer message within the marketplace. The marketing messages are then in conflict with the “cultural messages” already in play.

An Intentionally Crafted Culture is More Important than Good PR.

Culture "happens" whether you're intentional about it or not. Most companies just "let it happen."

You'd never handle your marketing unintentionally. In fact, you’ll invest a lot of money designing perfect marketing strategies. You might even have no problem paying professionals to assist. But you’d never even consider making even a small investment crafting your culture.

“Soft,” you say. “Not too smart,” I say.

This one single practice will absolutely prohibit your company or your ideas from expanding virally. Too many communications are in virtual conflict. The marketplace’s thinking about your company isn’t consistent and clear enough for natural customers to flow to you.

You can only imagine how well the cultural messages must be honed so that something distributed on YouTube, produced by some randomly involved “man-on-the-street” will present exactly the same message that in an ad costing the company thousands.

Get Better Results, Year After Year, Without Always Working Harder and Harder
Your company’s communication via culture must become clearer, tighter, and more intentionally directed, all the time. This one thing will grow a your revenues, customer loyalty and equity far faster than hiring more salespeople, offering more training, doing more marketing, or firing the CEO and hiring a new one.

It even makes sense to bring in expert help, a PEO, or a total service enterprise like Insperity, or a "Best Places to Work" consultant to get to work on your communications, that is, your corporate culture.

The good news is that if you make the investment to intentionally craft your internal communications, that is your corporate culture, you’ll begin to realize ever increasing benefits automatically . . . organically.