What I learned about building culture from a career in marketing.
Sometimes I think all we talk about is culture — maybe it’s because we’re still pretty new, maybe it’s because we haven’t got it right yet (and will we ever?) or maybe it’s just because we realise how important it is.
Launchpad is BP’s business builder, and although we’re a separate company, we’ve inherited a fair bit of BP’s culture. We’ve tried to take just the good bits and drop the rest (mainly the bits that slow us down). But the big thing I’ve learnt is how hard culture is to get right. And until recently I saw my role in building culture as something separate, from my day job in marketing.
Apart from five years in the wilderness of finance I’ve spent my whole career in marketing. Culture was something HR did — often to the rest of us. I remember BP’s values being rolled out and I wasn’t convinced. It all felt a bit introspective and frankly a bit obvious. As a marketer, I am obsessed with differentiation and when your values could be the identical to those of your competitors I switch off.
But now we’re building new businesses — and building ourselves as a new type of business builder — I realise how important culture is. And in fact, I realise how much like brand and marketing culture needs to be if it’s going to work and help you grow and scale fast.
Here’s a few things I’m learning that might be useful for Founders defining and building their own culture:
1. Sync up inside with outside
Firstly, and maybe obviously, both culture and brand need to be in sync. In this highly transparent world, you don’t need to look far to find disgruntled former employees venting about the mismatch between the external projection of the brand and the dictator running the place. And today, particularly, we as consumers care about these kinds of things — we want to feel good about where we put our money, we prize authenticity, we want brands to reflect who we are. So, as Founder, but more importantly your staff, should be able to draw a straight line between your external brand personality and your internal personality. And sometimes even the (maybe more authentic) personality of the company in the pub after work.
2. Differentiate to be loved (and to lose)
Secondly, as a Founder thinking about culture, you need to think like a marketer — you need to think how that culture is going to differentiate you from every other start-up. Exceptional talent’s hard to come by, even harder to retain — and good people need to know exactly where they stand. Some people don’t mind the kind of head-down-til-midnight-even-if-working-alone kind of place. For others they want to deeply connect with their colleagues, make lots of time to talk, to share ideas and collaborate. Being really clear who you are and who you aren’t — just as with branding — is critical to inspire love and loyalty. And you need to be brave about not being right for everyone — all things to all men and women, aka the path to mediocrity.
3. Practice it
And finally, just as with brand and marketing, culture isn’t a one-off exercise. Not only have we systematised the culture at Launchpad, locking it to our operating model, we measure it as part of our fortnightly retros so we have data to make it less abstract and fluffy. Culture is immensely fragile — a single bad apple can put you off track in days, unpicking what you may have taken for granted in weeks, disengaging and demoralising a team in months. It requires incredible discipline — it needs to permeate everything: daily interactions, feedback, investment decisions, hiring decisions.
It’s particularly critical for hiring. As soon as people say “I’m an expert in…” or “I can do that standing on my head”, it’s a warning bell at Launchpad. We know they’re not for us. They’ll be brilliant somewhere else, but here that humility and openness to learning are more important. We wrote this down early on as part of our code, but it’s been such a thread throughout our hiring, that it’s come to life far more through the people we’ve hired. So much so that the ones who started Launchpad from BP are having to work harder to embrace this aspect of our culture than our more recent hires.
So, one of the many lessons I’ve learnt this year is that culture is a lot more like marketing than I’d ever thought. Both are protagonists in building consistent, distinctive and all-consuming internal and external brands. It’s kind of obvious because done well both require the ability to step into other people’s shoes and ask “Why should I care?” — and then give people a good reason to do just that.
And because, done properly, both brand and culture are some of a Founder’s most valuable assets.
How do you use marketing and branding to build culture? Leave your comments below.
Adam Forbes
Launchpad, building new energy businesses.
