book review
By Alyson Nyiri, CHRL
FUSION: HOW INTEGRATING BRAND AND CULTURE POWERS THE WORLD’S
GREATEST COMPANIES
Here’s some good news: culture and brand are the nuclei
of your organization, the biggest drivers of the hard re-sults
your company produces daily. No longer are culture
and brand seen as the “soft stuff ” in business led by HR
and marketing, respectively. HR has known all along that culture
isn’t incidental to business performance; it’s the foundation upon
which success is built. Lee Yohn proposes the same thing.
If you’ve been in HR for any length of time, you know that
creating and developing a great culture starts long before a new
hire comes on board. It starts with how your company is posi-tioned
and branded in the marketplace. And to a large extent, HR
controls that message. Culture can be a powerful magnet in re-cruitment
efforts. Whether HR works closely with the marketing
department or not, most of us strive to make our culture attractive.
Amazon’s culture was described as “bruising,” “relentless” and
“painful” in a 2015 New York Times article. Its approach to manag-ing
staff was described as “purposeful Darwinism” with stories of
employees crying at their desks. Yet, Yohn argues, despite Amazon’s
“gladiator culture,” its constant drive for innovation is rooted in a
competitive, demanding, exacting organizational culture. Amazon
succeeds, she argues, because its internal culture and its external
brand are unified. Amazon’s “distinctive” culture encourages a per-formance-
driven environment that fires up employees to innovate
in pursuit of an outstanding, continuously improving customer
experience while its brand identity is built on delivering that same
innovative customer experience. This is fusion: the full integration
and alignment of external brand identity and internal organiza-tional
culture.
Market saturation makes it more challenging for a company to
sustain product leadership over time and to differentiate its brand
on product features or performance alone. But a definitive brand
identity expressed through superior customer service experiences
can help build long-term customer relationships and maintain
higher profit margins.
Brand-culture fusion improves your competitive advantage
because it embodies the unique why and how of what you do “as
people increasingly make decisions about which companies to
work for or to buy from based on meaning and shared values,
deliberately linking your brand to your culture can increase your
organization’s perceived relevance, differentiation and appeal.”
After a blog post outing the culture of sexism and sexual ha-rassment
at Uber, customers’ trust and esteem of the company
was eroded. Contrast this to Amazon, whose highly competi-tive
culture made sense to customers: whether they approved or
not, customers could see how the culture produced the benefits
they enjoyed.
Brands must live up to their promises and stated ideals in order
to be seen as authentic. Customers and employees expect to see
companies act authentically in the way they operate and the cus-tomer
experiences they deliver. When organizations align the
values and behaviours of their employees with what is expected
and experienced by their customers, you attract and retain em-ployees
who “feel an emotional commitment to your company
and brand.”
Many HR professionals will find this book resonates with the
culture development and attraction and retention work you are
already doing. Fusion is a useful complement to your work and
is a solid platform from which to gain executive collaboration on
HR management and to demonstrate its applicability to brand-culture
fusion. n
BY DENISE LEE YOHN (NICHOLAS BREALEY, 2018)
42 ❚ FEBRUARY 2018 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL