ThinkingSparks

Where is organizational culture in all this?

BrandXpress writes on criteria for healthy brands and consistency as the most important aspect of successful branding. I miss the factor organizational culture in all of this. Is it not important? Is it overlooked? Is it implicitly assumed? Is it not understood?

Some time ago I posted on Naïve views on Internal Branding. Alternative authors to the one I mentioned there are Hatch and Schultz. Their toolkit is interesting, but so are their publications.They take culture into consideration. They also voice their opinions about the simplistic approaches branding professionals and consultants take.

Interestingly enough when searching Technorati there are no hits when looking for these two ladies (their last names) and either “corporate branding”, “corporate culture” or “branding” in “all blogs”. I can hardly believe that to be true, but apparently their insights have not gone beyond the world of academics. Even though they put the culture into branding.

Virtuous brands

Another reference to Jennifer’s blog. In her post Words and meanings she is looking for a word to describe brands that are noble, upstanding, honorable, and have integrity. Heroic brands it became and in my previous post I posed several question with regard to that terminology.

Jennifer also describes her struggle on character and effect. I have been thinking about these topics for a long time too and I am writing my Master’s (Philosophy of Management and Organization) thesis on a related topic. As my previous post said I am not a fan of the term Heroic Brands. I have been looking into the theory of Virtue Ethics and came up with the term Virtuous Brands; or Virtuous Organizations for that matter.

In short, in virtue ethics the idea is to achieve Eudamonia, which means happiness of human flourishing. Eudamonia describes the state achieved by the person who lives the proper human live, which can be obtained by living by the virtues (Source: Wikepedia, although a lot is written about ethics and virtue ethics.)

Virtuous organizations can be a virtuous corporate brand if they allow and stimulate the people within and outside to live a virtuous life and not in any way impede that or in a paternalistic way decide for others what Eudamonia is for them.

As to the struggle on character and effect I like to suggest - in line with Matthew Healey - that a look at the three normative approaches (virtue ethics, deontological and teleological) in ethics will clarify the dilemma.