Brand Culture Quotes & Sayings

Your brand exists to differentiate. "Same crap, different day" won't do it. A day that goes by without breaking some sacred branding rule is a day a brand has lost to rise above the status quo. By breaking those rules with insight, intelligent and innovation, your brand can get heard in a world that's simply too busy to listen. — David Brier

Every great brand goes back to a courageous individual who dared to say 'NO' to the status quo. — David Brier

The brand is just a lagging indicator of a company's culture. — Tony Hsieh

Groupon as a company - it's built into the business model - is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We've carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture. — Andrew Mason

History is filled with inferior brands outselling superior ones thanks to better branding. Only superior branding has the power to overcome and reverse this (and superior products and services deserve superior branding). — David Brier

Consumers today have become a cynical mob of buyers who believe the reviews and ratings of complete strangers much more readily than your brand's promises and distinctions. — David Brier

Cookie cutters are for baking, not branding. — David Brier

Beyond brand, culture can help drive your product itself by creating the conditions for the idea generation that is and will continue to be the lifeblood of any company. — Leah Busque

We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer service, will just take care of itself. — Tony Hsieh

We've all seen it. A #startup begins with a #dream, a #passion to do something others have missed or overlooked. — David Brier

Look at every 'revolutionary' brand or category killer, it had an app, or a feature, or a functionality, or a user experience nobody else at that point could offer. I refer to this as 'the Killer App' principle. — David Brier

Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence. — Stewart Brand

Customers have a first moment when they discover your brand. If you were to look at it today with a fresh pair of eyes, in fact only through a pair of fresh customer eyes and witness your brand for the very first time, what would you see? What impression would make? Or fail to make? Would your brand blend in? Would it stand out? Would it be memorable, or the leading cause of amnesia amongst shoppers everywhere? Facing the truth of this and fixing it as needed will determine whether your brand thrives or merely stumbles along. — David Brier

We reject the charge of tribalism, particularly from those whose theologies serve to buttress the most nefarious brand of tribalism of all - the omnipotent state. The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural. Tribalism is not the church determined to serve God rather than Caesar. Tribalism is the United States of America, which sets up artificial boundaries and defends them with murderous intensity. — William H. Willimon

Social media technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, twitter, text messages to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one. — David Brooks

Brand is really the connection between you and your customersif you have a very strong culture, then the brand will come through. — Brian Chesky

We need to repent of our willing cooperation in our money-centered culture, which is depleting the natural resources that God designed for all humankind. He gave us a good earth. Let us serve him by helping to preserve it for our children. 'A good man leaves an inheritance for his children's children' (Proverbs 13:22 ). — Paul Brand

we've created a whole brand of churches that do not depend on the Spirit, a whole culture of Christians who are not disciples, a new group of "followers" who do not follow. If — Francis Chan

Ultimately, strong branding is not just a promise to our customers,to our partners, to our shareholders and to our communities;it is also a promise to ourselves ... in that sense, it is about using a brand as a beacon, as a compass, for determining the right actions, for staying the course, for evolving a culture, for inspiring a company to reach its full potential. — Carly Fiorina

When the magic of the brand is truly felt by the workforce, it can be called brandful. — Julia Gometz

Linguistics is a good way of defining the culture of a brand. The vocabulary used by sports and lifestyle brands - running, fitness, training, motorsports - is all about functionality, whereas the vocabulary of the luxury business - handbags, ready-to-wear - is all about the product. — Francois-Henri Pinault

The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny - and I'm happy with people using it; it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way. — David Lloyd

So it comes down to scarcity, one product or service having qualities you won't find everywhere or ideally, anywhere. It's the job of every brand to seek that out as their standard, their stamp. — David Brier

Your brand is your culture. — Tony Hsieh

Many young web designers view their craft the way I used to view pop culture. It's cool or it's crap. They mistake Style for Design, when the two things are not the same at all. Design communicates on every level. It tells you where you are, cues you to what you can do, and facilitates the doing. Style is tautological; it communicates stylishness. In visual terms, style is an aspect of design; in commercial terms, style can communicate brand attributes. — Jeffrey Zeldman

What's the best way to build a brand for the long term? In a word: culture. — Tony Hsieh

Why do some brands grow explosively when others (that could be thriving) die a lonely and forgettable death? — David Brier

Jobs and Clow agreed that Apple was one of the great brands of the world, probably in the top five based on emotional appeal, but they needed to remind folks what was distinctive about it. So they wanted a brand image campaign, not a set of advertisements featuring products. It was designed to celebrate not what the computers could do, but what creative people could do with the computers. " This wasn't about processor speed or memory," Jobs recalled. " It was about creativity." It was directed not only at potential customers, but also at Apple's own employees: " We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are. That was the genesis of that campaign. — Walter Isaacson

Having a me-too brand is a death sentence. — David Brier

In a consumerist culture, people rebel by buying a different brand, and instead of staging a real rebellion, which requires secret planning and stealthy strikes, American pseudo-radicals are constantly fingering themselves as soon as they hit the sidewalk. It's a fashion thing. In this illusionistic and narcissistic society, it's imperative that you look a certain way if you want to be slotted into one of the socially acceptable subgroups. It's all cosplay, all the time, for even the nerd look has been commodified and imbued with irony. — Linh Dinh

The opposite of value is a commodity item with little or no perceived value - which means people are not seeking it out and when they do, it's merely one of the many choices (so very likely the cheapest offering will get the sale). — David Brier

our belief is that our Brand, our Culture, and our Pipeline (which we internally refer to as "BCP") are the only competitive advantages that we will have in the long run. Everything else can and will eventually be copied. — Tony Hsieh

An exceptional brand culture has the effect of a charm, it entices and binds people. — Bernard Kelvin Clive

Who are we, and how do we relate this idea in a way that's meaningful to our customers and the values they hold dear?

In other words, one must define something meaningful. To do that, one must identify to whom this must be meaningful. — David Brier

The experience would be that a customer would have total access to Burberry across any device, anywhere, and they would get exactly the same feeling of the brand, feeling of the culture, regardless of where, when, how they were accessing the brand. — Angela Ahrendts

Make this part of your brand DNA ... Tell Your Story In a Way People Will Care. — Ted Rubin

Once you have something so deeply infused in your culture and your brand, it would be very difficult to reverse that inertia if you wanted to. — Andrew Mason

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure. — Bell Hooks

Our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand or empowering passionate employees and customers, will happen on its own. — Tony Hsieh

One can always sell something by offering the lowest price. But this does not create loyalty to your brand. Never did and never will. It only creates "loyalty" to that price point. As soon as your guest or visitor is offered a better price, he or she will jump ship, leaving you like a scorned lover in the middle of the night. — David Brier

When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear. — Kate O'Neill

Social networking technology allows us to spend our time engaged in a hypercompetitive struggle for attention, for victories in the currency of "likes." People are given more occasions to be self-promoters, to embrace the characteristics of celebrity, to manage their own image, to Snapchat out their selfies in ways that they hope will impress and please the world. This technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and Instagram to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one. The manager of this self measures success by the flow of responses it gets. The social media maven spends his or her time creating a self-caricature, a much happier and more photogenic version of real life. People subtly start comparing themselves to other people's highlight reels, and of course they feel inferior. — David Brooks

We are fortunate to have collectively built a culture that matters, a brand that matters, a business that matters. It is impossible to state in words how much this team means to me, how much Hulu means to me. — Jason Kilar

Jobs described Mike Markkula's maxim that a good company must "impute"- it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from packaging to marketing. Johnson loved it. It definitely applied to a company's stores. " The store will become the most powerful physical expression of the brand," he predicted. He said that when he was young he had gone to the wood-paneled, art-filled mansion-like store that Ralph Lauren had created at Seventy-second and Madison in Manhattan. " Whenever I buy a polo shirt, I think of that mansion, which was a physical expression of Ralph's ideals," Johnson said. " Mickey Drexler did that with the Gap. You couldn't think of a Gap product without thinking of the Great Gap store with the clean space and wood floors and white walls and folded merchandise. — Walter Isaacson

Eighty percent of all cultures are the same, it is the 20% that make a culture unique and slam dunks the brand promise to the customer. — Curt Coffman

Thomas Merton to write: The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television. His head is filled with inane slogans, songs, noises, explosions, statistics, brand names, menaces, ribaldries, and cliches. Then, when the child gets to school, he learns to verbalize, rationalize, to pace, to make faces like an advertisement, to need a car and in short, to go through life with an empty head conforming to others, like himself, in togetherness.3 — Brennan Manning

Your personal core values define who you are, and a company's core values ultimately define the company's character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny. — Tony Hsieh

Brands are either built on reruns or coming attractions. The future has no road map while the past does. Creating a brand that blazes new trails can sometimes be bumpy but will also allow you to be the first to discover something new, something meaningful and something that makes others ask, "Why didn't we think of that?" Be very scared of "old tricks" and build a spirit of innovation. It's the "old tricks" that have the highest risk, not doing something bold. — David Brier

A great sports car that goes from 0-60 in 3.9 seconds is just a fact. To the wrong audience, it's irrelevant. But to the right audience, it's a passion. — David Brier

Brand is how others see you, culture is how you see yourself. — Curt Coffman

A good culture in a hospital can absorb and manage a few bad nurses, but once the culture becomes bad in itself, bad nursing practice is much harder to hide. — Jo Brand

The biggest mistake brands make are trying to "sell their stuff" rather than clarifying what people are actually buying. — David Brier

Your culture is your brand. — Tony Hsieh

I've always thought that "punk" wasn't really a genre. My band started in Olympia where K Records was and K Records put out music that didn't sound super loud and aggressive. And yet they were punk because they were creating culture in their own community instead of taking their cue from MTV about what was real music and what was cool. It wasn't about a certain fashion. It was about your ideology, it was about creating a community and doing it on your own and not having to rely on, kinda, "The Man" to brand you and say that you were okay. — Kathleen Hanna

Loyalty - deep, intense, devoted loyalty - to a leader or a culture, to any group, brand or idea, goes far beyond being engaged or having our needs met. We see our emotional selves in that connection. We see our future, our best selves and our better angels in that connection. — Bill Jensen

There are three points I used to help a gourmet chocolatier increase sales 300% in a single month as well as a Midwest city to increase tourism guests 500% in 12 months. — David Brier

Evidently, one thing seems to have more value in direct proportion to whether or not we feel we have the freedoms, joys or conveniences of that thing. — David Brier

When it comes to branding and the ever-changing social media phenomenon, you're not a mushroom. In other words, you shouldn't be kept in the dark and fed a pile of...well, you get the idea. — David Brier

I realized with a growing and startling sense of clarity that the seminary was educating and training me for a world that no longer existed. Moreover, the posture of this particular brand of Christianity toward the surrounding culture was one of enormous suspicion and at times hostility. It seemed that part of this evolving designation involved a posture of entrenchment and argument toward culture. But I loved culture. I loved the freedom to engage with people for the purpose of friendship and dialogue, not simply evangelism. — Tim Keel

Why is it there's no aisle in a grocery or department in a store or menu on a website for "average stuff" or "beige products"? FACT: People never got passionate about mediocre and average. While consumers and clients can find "best deals" and "natural foods" and "artisan goods," one doesn't find an aisle or a website menu tab offering "average stuff" without excelling in something (which might explain that while vanilla is necessary for the ice cream sundae, it's the hot fudge we all crave and talk about). — David Brier

Corporate brand, culture, knowledge, and risk management are all boardroom concerns. — Pearl Zhu

Hip-hop and being a pro athlete go hand in hand. When they come together, it's a win, not just for your business brand but also for culture. — Kendrick Lamar

Brand growth and dominance is created by having the highest brand value, not the lowest price tag. — David Brier

The point about pop culture is that so much of it is borrowed. There's very little that's brand new. Instead, creativity today is a kind of shopping process - picking up on and sampling things form the world around you, things you grew up with. — RuPaul

It becomes a question of 'How do we convey our differentiation instantaneously?' and drive a wedge between any apparent (or assumed) sameness in the marketplace. — David Brier