Branding Begins in the Culture From Within Your Own Four Walls

• September 11, 2025

By Peter van Aartrijk

Everyone gets jazzed about customer branding. But it really begins with the brand inside your four walls: your culture. Brand and culture are intertwined; you can’t strengthen one without strengthening the other.

Imagine the continuum of an infinity symbol. Brand and culture flow from each side of the loop to the other. In the middle is the “x.” That is where core values live, because they should be shared on the inside and outside of the organization.

The idea that a brand is a promise to the customer is a tad simplistic, but it gets the point across. If the product or service experience doesn’t measure up to expectations, the ripple effect from the resulting customer disappointment will tarnish the brand.

Similarly, culture is the expectation of an elevated level of behavior and interaction in the workplace, based on the idea that the things we do have a larger purpose than just making the numbers.

Recall what you might have been looking for as you walked onto your college campus for the first time. All the hopes and dreams for your future, and this was the place where it was to begin. Did it amaze you or disappoint you?

If your experience was typical, college was amazing, with eyes opened and horizons broadened. Lots of work, but intensely interesting and engaging. The excitement of graduation and the start of the next great adventure.

Is that the experience your corporate culture provides to the people who come and work for you? Do they leave only when they feel they have “graduated” and are ready to go on to something greater? Or are they aching to get out after only a few months, leaving this soul-sucking experience behind for good once they finish that nasty review on Glassdoor?

Culture for Focus and Discipline

Strong cultures actively guide employee actions, so they intuitively know what to do to deliver on the brand promise. Associates participating in a vibrant culture are empowered to make decisions based on the core values outlined in the brand strategy, instead of being drubbed into numbness by procedural manuals or canned scripts that they regurgitate to customers with all the excitement of a banana slug eating a toadstool.

Cultures that operate from their core values invite innovation and informed risk-taking because they remove the constant need for individuals to ask permission or fear the repercussions of stepping out on their own. Consequently, strong-cultured companies are more effective and efficient—and it shows on the bottom line.

In successful organizations, culture is not simply about team building, it’s about having a unifying vision that starts at the top and is brought to life through the team and the environment. It is not enough to come up with an inspirational slogan and paint it on the walls. The most effective, innovative and progressive firms put their most brilliant minds at work to find original ways to make culture a tangible reality.

A Foundation of Core Values

Your North Star in building culture is your authentic, relevant set of core values. In fact, the only employee manual that really matters is your list of values. Here are six steps to creating an impactful list of core values.

1) Realize this isn’t an HR project. Human resources should not own culture alone, just as marketing shouldn’t own the brand by itself. Guided by a powerful conviction beginning with the C-suite or principal, every employee has a voice, and everyone owns the culture and brand. The result is more efficiency, more autonomy and more personal achievement. Leadership needs to uphold the values but does not need to micromanage individuals.

2) Be authentic and specific. Core values should describe how workers should behave at your firm, not some other firm. “Create fun and a little weirdness” works well for Las Vegas-based shoe retailer Zappos, but would it work for a regional insurance carrier?

If your culture isn’t truly open to change, then a value such as “challenge the status quo” will be an issue. If workers follow that one, they’ll be free—encouraged, in fact—to raise a hand in a department meeting and ask something like, “Our customer onboarding process seems stale. We’ve done it the same way for as long as I can remember. Why don’t we rethink the whole shebang?” That sort of corporate conflict will only be okay when workers trust each other and the C-suite is open to change.

Since values guide employee behavior, make them personal. Avoid platitudes and cliches such as “the customer is always right”—which isn’t even true, by the way.

Here are some examples of various organizations’ core values, each of which would be an excellent conversation starter for creating your values:

• Learn, unlearn, relearn.
• Challenge ourselves and each other.
• Love what you do.
• Do more with less.
• Communicate honestly.
• Be fearless and wildly creative.
• Encourage and embrace innovation.
• Have fun.

3) Write them down. Your list of five to seven core values will guide how your employees should behave. If you don’t discuss those values, write them down and freely share them around the organization, they don’t exist at all. In that case, workers will freelance, making up their own culture as they go. A piece of moldy bread is still a culture, but it’s gross and haphazard. It’s better to curate a nice culture, like fresh Greek yogurt.

4) Make them a priority. Try an easy test. Ask a few workers, “What are our core values?” If they can’t speak about them consistently, then your agency’s core values are not memorable or clearly differentiated, and thus not useful.

Values should be prominently displayed in public, as well as in employee-only locations, so go ahead and hang them up on the wall. But remember that cafeteria posters alone won’t cut it. Each region, each division, each office, each department should ask, “How do we live out these values?” Employees should internalize them and feel empowered by them. When you have values-driven decision making, you can say to someone you manage in any office: “You don’t need to come to me on every decision; you can make a decision based on our core values.”

Values can’t be presented just once. Employees need to know what they mean as part of their everyday work lives. Continue to communicate through speech and actions in an inspiring and interesting way so workers understand the implications and begin to live them.

5) Hire correctly from the get-go. Sure, that sounds obvious. But armed with a set of core values, the recruiting process is more compelling, insightful and productive. Your list of values should be your first agenda item when the conversation turns—as it necessarily should—to, “Do you want to hear about how we work here?”

6) Accept that things are never going to be perfect. Like human beings, cultures are living, breathing, evolving things. The health of both your culture and your brand shouldn’t be taken for granted. Both take care and feeding. Both are works in progress. While your organization may have cultural differences among offices or subsidiaries, the key is to be continuously driving toward an end goal of a healthy and consistent culture, realizing there will be some bumps in the road.

Teams Build Resilient Cultures

However, if you want to grow, expand and succeed in a competitive marketplace, you’ll need superb teammates. To attract that talent, you’ll need to put in some work to create a compelling culture.

Here are four ideas to bring together a group of people who will bring your core values to life:

1) Get out of the office. Team building isn’t about sitting in conference rooms; it’s about getting outside of the corporate framework and being humans together. So go to a concert or sporting event, arrange monthly happy hours, take a hike, meet at a local brewery, or go on a food tour.

Charity work is great fun. Not only does volunteering strengthen employees’ communities, but it also builds professional skills and advances careers. That’s a win-win for everyone.

2) Try something new or learn together. Happiness and learning are closely tied. When you try new things together, you each become slightly vulnerable, and it’s that vulnerability that builds good vibes and draws you closer. If you’re interested in upping the ante, go for something unusual: sky diving, zip lining, or sailing.

Think outside the box—and outside the conference room—and watch the positive feelings grow. A huge part of building vibrant, positive cultures is making it okay to fail, which is paramount to building trust.

3) Build teams with intent and purpose. Team dynamics have a big impact on engagement. Constructing your teams based purely on industry experience or education level means leaving out people with important skills. A diverse, engaged and healthy team culture produces greater innovation and satisfaction than a bunch of jealous geniuses all looking out for themselves.

4) Ditch the annual performance review. Why wait a year to provide important feedback? Rather, use mobile apps to stay connected with associates in the home office and afar. Ask workers questions on a range of topics and get feedback immediately. Asking employees just one question a day or week elicits far better feedback and data than the typical annual or quarterly snoozer of a review.

Culture consultant Warren Wright recommends “micro-feedback,” which is valuable in particular for Generation Z workers, who are currently in their 20s. This equates to “real-time, bite-sized feedback,” he says.

Manage core values well, and they’ll manage the business well, resulting in a brand that goes beyond company colors and snappy slogans.

Peter van Aartrijk is executive vice president of Aartrijk and has managed insurance research and branding strategy since 1990. This piece is adapted from “The Powers: 10 Factors for Building an Exponentially More Powerful Brand,” a book he co-authored with Tony Wessling.