Branding: An essential part of OD as a healing work
Written by Regina Vanda| 22 Feb 2022
Sequoia has always recognised organisational development as healing work. That is, the work is directed towards the health and flourishing of the organisations as well as the teams and individuals that make up these organisations. It is a simultaneous part-for-the-whole and whole-for-the-part approach organisational health as a living system very much like healthcare for the living system of the human body or, for that matter, horticulture for the living system of plants and the garden ecosystem. All business management processes — we believe — can be enriched by this approach to the businesses as living systems. Indeed, this enables them to be ‘living companies’.
In light of this, branding is a business management process worth examining. On the surface, brand development may appear to merely help the company to ‘sell’ better and bolster its financial health as such. But from a living system perspective, good branding can do much more for the flourishing of the organization than fuelling it with income. We reflect on some of the ways that developing an authentic and aspirational brand can essentially facilitate healing for a living company.
Authenticity
The brand of an organisation is the clearest expression of its identity which tells a story of its purpose and the values that it stands for. The brand identity runs through every level of the organisation’s operations, all the choices made therein, from purpose all the way to tactics and activities.
When there are misalignments in these different levels, the organisation and its parts suffer from the incoherence and even contradictions. Branding is unsuccessful when the purpose says one thing but the tactics undermine it, when there is a vision statement but the everyday events reveal a different vision-in-use. It could be argued that in these cases, there is no authentic brand to speak of.
In contrast, an authentic brand enables authentic transformation — a meaningful change that is true to the core of what the organization was, is and continues to be. It helps that brand identity is visually and literally arresting as a common point of reference to keep coming back to even in the midst of transformation which may at times be difficult or even painful.
Integration
While a brand is able to anchor the internal coherence of an organisation, external integration is of no less importance. Returning to the living system perspective, an organisation flourishes in relation to the ecosystem that it serves and that sustains it. While the organisation is a whole in itself, it is also part of a larger whole to which it must be attuned and within which it must find a clear niche.
Brand development is a process of finding and articulating that niche for mutual recognition — the organisation recognising its place in the ecosystem and the ecosystem recognising the role that the organisation plays as its unique contribution. Here the work of the organisation– including its products, process, platforms or people- find its meaning through integration.
Furthermore, a good brand is a natural hub that builds around it a network of mutually beneficial connections between parts of the ecosystem.
Guidance and co-creation
But if brand development stops at what is beneficial to the organisation in the present, it still falls short of the healing work that it is capable of, especially when we think of organisation as shapers and movers of systems. The need to transform towards a more sustainable economy, that does not sell products and services for the sake of profit or encourage limitless consumption, means that a fundamental act of leadership is needed in the process of branding.
The brand of an organisation can be a tool for active adjustment of customers’ value perception and can influence the trajectory of entire economy. It is a form of advocacy towards a world that the organisation stands for and hopes to co-create. That is, the brand does not inspire confidence for sales and loyalty but invites into co-creative relationship with long term wellbeing for all — i.e. sustainability- in mind.
“Nurturing long-term deep relationships is the basis of effective co-creation and core to long-term organisational success.”
— Unleashing the sustainable business: how purpose transforms an organisation, part 2
We can think of branding as an exercise in building long-term, deep and generative relationships with stakeholders — healing the disconnect and tending towards regeneration. So while a good brand anchors transformation in an authentic constant that can be continuously preserved through change, it also fuels continuous innovation through a ‘guide and co-create approach’.
Genuine branding is no skin-deep work. At its best, it gets to be a healing work that touches the organisation from the core all the way to the ecosystem and the future reality it can participate in co-creating.
