Trellis Growth Partners

I recently explored, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything... in Business (and in Life). Author, Dov Seidman, a noted leadership expert, demonstrates that the nature of today's fast-paced, information-driven, social media enhanced environment has changed the nature of reputation and culture building.  As a marketer and management consultant, Seidman's message struck an important chord.

Our personal and professional "brands" are under more scrutiny than ever before.  In the 1960's -- think Mad Men era marketing, simply devising a great visual and copy strategy then funding it well would build a brand.  Now, forty years later, there are a multitude of inputs into creating and fortifying a brand's reputation.  Primary examples include positioning (intended by the company -- a la Mad Men), the actual living internal culture created by team members, traditional media reviews and real-time customer feedback made possible by social media.  All of these measures and more contributes to a brand or company's net reputation quotient.

So how we conduct ourselves is much more important than what we proclaim.  It is no longer enough to demonstrate only quantitative success metrics; a brand must strive to create a positive culture and reputation, which necessarily means embracing the qualitative measures of integrity, values, social responsibility and more.  Since we are constantly being evaluated, our messages must be more genuine; more organic and less concocted.

Personal and company reputation are therefore now the sum of "how" we've achieved instead of the collection of "what" we have achieved.  How is your company reflecting this in its marketing communication and management efforts?  Have you changed your approach to brand and leadership management in the last 10, 20 or 40 years?