Over my nearly 30 years as a brand steward for three public B2B companies I variously studied and benchmarked best practices of acknowledged pre-eminent industrial and commercial brands. In applying as much practical wisdom as possible, I found that many of the brand-building techniques and tactics fell under the auspices of organizational culture (i.e., HR), communications, and marketing. While all certainly are instrumental in brand development, there seemed to be missing elements in the larger project of brand reputation.

It was only in the last decade of my career when I arrived at an epiphany about brand, one that challenged many of my previous convictions about the way brands develop and earn reputational stature.

My late-found insight had the benefit of deep and wide organizational understanding from a senior leadership perspective. The ability to see and appreciate all the gears that operated across the business, and particularly the multiple components and interdependencies that influenced organizational success, changed my views about brand and branding.

During this period, I came across a commentary from an investment analysis firm that happened to cover my company’s financial performance. The report related to the connection between operating culture and consistently strong financial performance.

As explained in the report, when evaluating investment opportunities, “… the most important intangible is the culture of an entity and management’s ability to enhance the value of assets over time. Culture must be driven by simple business models/systems to be effective.” (Why Culture Matters: Simplicity is an Investible Theme. Melius Research, 2018.)

The commentary validated ideas I had intermittently been developing even as it blurred definitions: the authors were actually speaking about operating culture as opposed to organizational culture. While both play critical roles in determining brand strength, organizational culture (with some communications and marketing help) tends to garner the lion’s share of the credit for however the brand materializes.

But because operating culture is a critical co-determinant of the reputational calculus, it made sense that operational matters should play a role in strategic brand management. I applied that insight at my last port of call with Herc Rentals, where I left behind a brand platform that leaned heavily into the operational component of brand reputation. In fact, because the brand platform is predicated on operational fluency, it formed the basis for what eventually became the company’s emergent “E3OS” operating system.

Still, even beyond organizational and operating culture, a much larger, dynamic, and complex ecosystem exists in every organization of size. Collectively, this organizational machinery continuously shapes the contours of brand reputation, and sometimes dramatically so.

This organizational ecosystem is de facto a brand system, even if it is anything but systematic. It operates beyond the scope of what we consider the traditional remit of brand practitioners, which explains why so much of brand stewardship dabbles only around the edges of what truly matters in brand differentiation and performance.

This website explores the nature of the brand system while offering a few suggestions on how to bend what ultimately is an unruly organism toward the betterment of brand reputation. While the ideas expressed here may not address the shortcomings inherent to traditional brand stewardship, they may enlighten those who ultimately have more say in how their brands gain and preserve reputational equity.

Paul A. Dickard

I am a senior brand and communications strategist who encompasses multidisciplinary experience in reputation-oriented practices, including internal and external communications, public affairs, issues and crisis management, marketing, and brand management.

Et cetera: Seasoned writer and copy editor, organizational anthropologist, workshop facilitator, enthusiast photographer.