The best organisations make a clear promise to customers. And to their people. You can too.

But first, throw out the cookie cutter. Cut out the clichés and take a pass on platitudes. Dig a bit deeper to find the ambition and the authentic truth.

Every company can cultivate a distinct identity – not just for its customers but for its people. Culture is a powerful force that shapes how people perceive and interact with an organisation. But the path to a distinctive culture isn’t a template. It’s defined by what you actually believe, why you exist, and what you’re willing to stand for when it costs you something.... Because behaviour trumps statements every time.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, especially when I’m working on values: nobody cares about your values.

Not the words, anyway. Not the poster in reception. Not the slide in the onboarding deck that lists ‘integrity, innovation, excellence’ alongside every other company in your sector.

People care about behaviours. What gets rewarded. What gets challenged. What happens when a decision is hard and nobody’s watching. That’s culture. And if your values aren’t shaping those moments, they’re window dressing.

Similar but different

Take two meta-retailers we all know. Amazon and IKEA. Both are value-focused. Both have built enormous, successful businesses. Their cultures couldn’t be more different.

Amazon is relentless. High-intensity, high-expectation, unapologetically demanding. Their leadership principles don’t mince words: ‘Have backbone; disagree and commit.’ You know where you stand. The pressure to meet customer expectations is unrelenting – and that’s by design.

IKEA leads with togetherness. It's the first of their eight values: ‘Togetherness is at the heart of the IKEA culture. We are strong when we trust each other, pull in the same direction and have fun together.’ Cooperative. Warm. A team-player mindset built into everything.

Both retail. Global.Both successful. Completely different philosophies.

Notice what they do have in common: both are specific. Neither is hiding behind ‘we value teamwork’ or ‘we believe in excellence.’ They’ve done the work to articulate what they actually mean – in language that has character, that sets expectations, that you could use to make a decision or challenge a behaviour.

Compare that with ‘teamwork makes the dreamwork.’ A sentiment  similar to IKEA's, but the cliché kills the intent. Why? It rings insincere. It could be anyone. It says nothing about how you work together, or why, or what happens when togetherness is tested.

The right words matter. Not because words are magic – but because lazy words signal lazy thinking. And people can tell the difference.

This is principles and personality doing their job

When I work on brand strategy, two of the four foundations I define are your principles and personality. Most people associate these with external brand expression – how you look and sound to customers. But they’re just as powerful internally. Maybe more so.

Principles are your guardrails. What you believe. What you won’t compromise on. When a decision is hard – and decisions are often hard – this is what you fall back on. Amazon's ‘disagree and commit’ is a principle. It tells people exactly how to handle conflict. You don't need a manager to adjudicate every disagreement – the principle does it.

Personality is how you show up. The character of the organisation. IKEA's ‘togetherness’ isn’t just a value – it's a personality trait. It shapes the tone of internal communications, the way stores feel, how teams are structured. You walk into IKEA and you feel it.

These aren’t separate from brand strategy. They are brand strategy – the part that faces inward. And when they’re clear, distinctive, and honestly held, they create a culture that's genuinely hard to replicate.

Which is exactly the point. Your competitors can copy products. They can match your pricing. They can’t copy your culture – because culture comes from what you actually believe, not what you claim to.

What I see when the work is done well

I’ve worked with organisations where defining principles genuinely changed how people operated. Not overnight – culture doesn’t shift like that. But over time, you see it.

A leadership team that had been making decisions by committee – endless consensus-seeking, everything taking twice as long as it should – defined a principle around decisive action. Not recklessness. Clarity about who owns a decision and the expectation that they’ll make it. Within six months, the tempo of the business had changed.

A professional services firm that kept losing good people to competitors defined principles that weren’t about perks or benefits but about how they wanted to treat each other. Candour. Generosity with credit. No tolerance for politics. They didn’t suddenly become perfect. But they had language for what ‘good’ looked like, and people started holding each other to it.

In both cases, the principles weren't aspirational. They were true. Drawn from the organisation at its best, not from a wishlist of what it might become. That's the difference between principles that stick and principles that get ignored.

If you don’t define it, someone else will

Here’s the practical reality.

If you don’t articulate what's expected of your people – the actions and behaviours you’ll value and reward – who will? Longstanding employees with their own habits? The loudest voice in the room? The lowest common denominator?

Your brand makes a promise to customers. It needs to make a promise to your people too. Not as a ‘nice to have.’ As the mechanism for delivering the customer promise in the first place.

Think about it. The people answering your phones, writing your emails, running your workshops, handling complaints – they are the brand experience for most of your customers. If they don’t know what the brand stands for, how it should feel, what’s expected of them beyond the job description – they’ll improvise. And what they improvise won’t be consistent. It won’t be strategic. It’ll just be whatever feels right in the moment.

That’s how you get a brand that says one thing on the website and delivers something completely different in person.

The promise to your people

So what does a good internal promise look like? Not a slogan – although a clarion call can be useful as a memory device. It needs to be fleshed out in clear terms:

What do we believe? Not ‘integrity"’ – what does integrity actually mean here, in this organisation, in the decisions we face? What does it look like on a Tuesday afternoon when a client is pushing for something we know isn't right?

How do we work? Not ‘collaboratively’ – what does collaboration actually mean when two teams disagree on priorities? Who decides? How do we handle it?

What do we reward? Not just output and results – what behaviours do we celebrate? What do we challenge?

What won't we tolerate? This is the one most organisations skip. But the boundaries matter as much as the aspirations. Amazon is clear about this. IKEA is clear about this. The companies that struggle are the ones who define what they want but never articulate what they won’t accept.

The best internal promises have the same quality as the best external positioning: they're specific enough to be useful and distinctive enough to be true only of you.

Culture evolves. It’s a good thing.

Just as markets shift and customer expectations change, culture changes too. What worked when you were twenty people won’t necessarily work at two hundred. The scrappy intensity of a start-up doesn’t always scale – and it shouldn’t have to.

So it makes sense to revisit the foundations from time to time. What’s working? What’s emerged in our culture that we should recognise and represent? What doesn’t ring true anymore?

That process – shared by the team, honest about what’s changed – can itself be a powerful catalyst for growth. Not just because it updates the words, but because it reconnects people to what the organisation is becoming.

Which comes first? A great brand or a great culture.

Who cares. Let’s leave it to the academics. In the cut and thrust of business, what matters is that one feeds and nurtures the other. It’s a virtuous circle.

The brands that get this right don’t treat culture as an HR project and brand as a marketing project. They treat them as the same thing, seen from different angles. Define what you stand for clearly enough, and it shapes both how customers see you and how your people show up.

That’s not two strategies. It's one – working inside and out.

If your culture feels generic, your brand probably does too. Let's fix the foundations.

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