brand

How Work Culture Impacts Brand Reputation

Work culture has been defined as “the interactions of all employees which in the aggregate creates a picture of how things get done and what matters inside the organization” (Gebler 2017). Culture, at a point, intersects with brand reputation in that it can be considered two sides of the same coin. Reputation comes from the external belief of your company behavior, while culture is how people inside your company behave and reaffirm those beliefs.

Earlier this month, we held a thought-provoking session that explored how work culture and impacts brand reputation, specifically exploring the conversation from the perspective of academics and business leaders.

Session presenters included:

  • David Gebler, of Indiggo, Washington, DC has over twenty years’ experience working with global organizations on how to reduce people based risks while improving productivity and corporate reputation. Named as one of America’s top Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior.
  • Dennis Hirsch, Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Data and Governance at The Ohio State University. In 2010, he served as a Fulbright Senior Professor at the University of Amsterdam where he produced a leading study on Collaborative Dutch data protection regulation.
  • Bob Bowman, Director Risk Management, The Wendy’s Corporation. Bob has a diverse risk management background with Macy’s for many years and since 2014 with Wendy’s. Bob’s background and responsibility include enterprise risk, business continuity, data and privacy risk management.
  • Lowell (Chip) Howard, Jr., Honda North America, Inc. Chip is General Counsel- Manufacturing at Honda North America and has responsibility for HNA Law Division’s offices in Ohio, Alabama, Indiana and South Carolina.

At its core, culture and brand reputation have effective leaders and leadership as an underlying foundational element.  From that core, effective leaders develop engaged employees who develop loyal customers.

The impact of Big Data on culture and brand reputation begins with what Professor Hirsch refers to as the Three V’s: volume, velocity and variety.  The fourth attribute is correlation.  The use of big data can bring great benefit, but also significant risk to a brand. A now classic example is when Target figured out that a teen girl was pregnant before her father did.

The Target Example

Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they’ve bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. (Forbes) Target then uses this data to create highly personalized marketing materials.

In the case with the pregnant teen, she received a mailer containing only advertisements for baby products. Her father saw the mailer and become enraged, as he thought that Target was encouraging her to become a teen mother. After some back and forth with his local Target’s management, where Target apologized for the error, the father returned to the store and informed management that his daughter was indeed expecting.

Target and many other companies continue to utilize big data in order to generate a customized consumer experience. But now, in order to mitigate the risk of revealing consumer secrets and just generally spooking people, Target incorporates those customized advertisements in with the regular circulars.

Big data certainly has massive benefits for companies and the consumer when applied thoughtfully and strategically, but can create headaches for brands when used too liberally.

Thinking Practically

Bob Bowman and Chip Howard engaged the audience in discussion about how their respective companies leverage positive company culture towards a positive brand image.

At Wendy’s, culture and values are everything, going all the way back to Dave Thomas, the company’s founder. Bowman expounded on some of the trials Wendy’s have been through over the years — from fingers in chili to viral Frosty videos — and how Wendy’s leveraged its brand equity and relied on culture to see them through varying crises.

Values inform culture at Honda too, in the form of the three joys — the joy of buying, the joy of selling, and the joy of creating — and respect for the individual. Howard explained to participants that every Honda employee are encouraged to “find their Honda joy” because Honda believes that when associates work towards their own happiness first, the company will grow as a result.

Takeaways

  • Brand reputation and company culture are two sides of the same coin.
  • Effective leaders develop engaged employees which ultimately lead to loyal customers. At the core is effective leadership.
  • In managing big data and big data analytics risk, we must be careful to consider the potential impacts of the data, the correlation of the data, how that data could profile and what predictions can be made using the data.
  • Significant benefit can exist from the big data analytics. Risks, however, are present to include privacy violation, legal and regulatory, as well as the consequential brand and values impact.
  • Wendy’s core belief is that their success is based on the relationship with the customer. The foundation is food, which relationship is enhanced or eroded by behavior and trust is earned when both are delivered in a predictable consistent manner.
  • The Honda philosophy is built on a foundation of respect for the individual. From that fundamental belief, they believe that;
    • Initiative — Associates should not be bound by preconceived ideas.
    • Equality — Recognize and respect individual differences in one another and treat each other fairly.
    • Trust — The associate relationship should be based on mutual trust.

The Risk Institute at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business exists to bridge the gap between academia and corporate America. By combining the latest research with the real-world expertise of America’s most forward-thinking companies, the Risk Institute isn’t just reporting risk management’s current trends — it’s creating tomorrow’s best practices.

Governance and culture take center stage at The Risk Institute’s Annual Conference

Conversation surrounding governance and culture recently took center stage at The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business, as The Risk Institute explored the impacts of the two key aspects of business at its Annual Conference. The two-day conference brought together Risk Institute members, business leaders, experts and faculty thought leaders from Fisher for an in-depth examination of the risk management and strategic implications of governance and culture.

Phil Renaud and Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams discuss maintaining culture through crisis.

Phil Renaud and Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams discuss maintaining culture through crisis.

Considering the various sides of governance and culture is critical to understanding how to leverage risk management to create value for an organization. The conference featured four keynote speakers, Gordon Bethune, former CEO of Continental Airlines; Cameron Mitchell, founder and CEO of Cameron Mitchell Restaurants; Randall Kroszner, former Governor of the Federal Reserve System; and David Gebler, author of best-selling book The 3 Power Values.

Bethune opened the conference and focused on his experience turning around Continental Airlines over a decade, which is detailed in his book, From Worst to First. He emphasized the importance of building accountability between employees and the organization saying, “What gets measured and rewarded, gets done.”

Mitchell is a self-described serial entrepreneur who understands that taking risks is necessary to be successful in business saying, “I may shoot myself in the foot and walk with a limp, but I’ll never shoot myself in the head and make a fatal mistake.”

Academic Director Isil Erel speaking at Annual Conference 2016.

Academic Director Isil Erel speaking at Annual Conference 2016.

During his time with the Federal Reserve System and as a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Kroszner never imagined he would be helping guide America’s economy through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He discussed the potential ramifications of the Fed keeping interests rates at historic lows since 2008 saying, “When your short-run policy becomes a long-run policy, you will always run into unintended consequences.”

Named one of America’s top Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior, Gebler is an innovator of new approaches that integrate culture, ethics, values and performance. His talk detailed how to know if your organization’s culture is a risk factor utilizing the three power values— integrity, transparency and commitment.

In addition to the keynotes, the third-annual conference brought together business leaders and experts for a series of RISKx presentations and panel discussions on women in risk, governance and culture related to business. The culture discussion explored  employees’ attitudes toward risk, mergers and acquisitions, maintaining culture through crisis, and emerging risks in the energy industry.

The Risk Institute’s Executive Education Series will resume November 15 with a discussion on Political Risk.

 

Can New Technologies Undermine Your Company’s Brand? The Employee and Customer Experience

minton bernadette 130x195By Professor Bernadette A. Minton
Academic Director and Interim Executive Director, The Risk Institute
Arthur E. Shepard Endowed Professor in Insurance
Professor of Finance
The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business

It’s almost 2016 (or it is already, depending on when you’re reading this). Everything is digital, and so you took the plunge and developed a mobile app for your customers. The launch of your new mobile app was supposed to streamline and enhance the customer experience, but since it was released it seems as if your customers and your employees rue the day the app appeared. Is it possible that this app has actually been detrimental to your business? Have you found yourself thinking, why haven’t my customers and my employees embraced this new technology?

From Apple to Zillow, digital disruption – the impact of new technologies on the existing consumer brand experience – challenges consumer business. The first thought that comes to mind is that digital disruptions continue to raise consumer expectations about the brand and their online and in-store experiences.

Yet, there is another side. One that is not often considered, but equally important: the digital expectations of the company’s employees. The employees who are charged with innovating the brand and enhancing customers’ brand experiences are also savvy digital users themselves with their own increasingly elevated digital expectations. Senior executives need to consider how digital disruptions also are influencing and modifying their employees’ behaviors and expectations.

At our upcoming Risk Series, Digital Disruption: Brand, Strategy and Technology, taking place on January 21, 2016, our session leaders Deborah Mitchell, Clinical Professor of Marketing, with The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business, and Keith Strier, Principal, with EY Advisory Strategy and Practice and Founder of IDEAS (Innovation, Digital Enterprise & Agile Strategy) collaborate to discuss applications of current research on consumer behavior to digital engagement with customers and employees to understand your organization’s digital vulnerabilities and opportunities.

I invite you to join us and other executives in this interactive session as we engage in conversations about the leading strategies to understand customers’ and employees’ digital experiences as well as discuss the current challenges firms face in today’s digital environment. You will gain insights into how you can develop an enterprisewide digital strategy aligned with your firm’s corporate strategy and brand vision. You will also be in the position of leveraging, and not just mitigating, digital disruptions with your employees and with your customers.

The Risk Institute Executive Education Series will continue on January 21, 2016 with Digital Disruption: Brand, Strategy and Technology, a half-day course for executives. For more information, or to sign up for the session, visit FISHER.OSU.EDU/RISK

Managing the Risks and Opportunities of Social Media

By Professor Bernadette A. Minton, Academic Director, The Risk Institute
Arthur E. Shepard Endowed Professor in Insurance

During the last decade, the rise of social media, which accelerated with the introduction of smartphone technology, has provided unprecedented opportunities for organizations to build influence, their brand, and reputations.  The organic nature of social media allows enterprises to reach millions of consumers and influencers in ways they never could before.

Yet, this opportunity does not come without risks.

RiskInstitute_block B 250x296During a recent Risk Institute Executive Education session on Social Media and Risk Management, Prof. Lanier Holt of The Ohio State University’s School of Communication stressed the effect of social media in today’s media climate is that “Perception IS the Realty.” Customers, bloggers and others can use social media to quickly turn on a firm/brand, leaving in shambles a distant memory of its once vibrant self.

Thus, it is not surprising that, in the same session, Bill Deakin, Executive Director, North American Consumer Products, EY, noted that recent surveys consistently report that executives view social media as one of the leading risks facing their organizations.

An organization’s brand is a collaborative effort of most, if not all, areas of the firm – from marketing and sales to finance and operations.  As such, the benefits and risks of social media rarely impact just one area of an organization.  So, as Deakin stressed, a social media strategy must be an organization-wide responsibility.

By integrating enterprise risk management strategies for understanding, evaluating and managing these risks, organizations can capitalize on the opportunities inherent in social media, which include:

  • empowering consumers to comment anywhere and anytime on an organization and what it is doing and companies to provide real-time feedback to customers letting them know they are being heard.
  • providing organizations a venue to tell stories in engaging ways to a wider audience, helping to build reputation, customer affinity and sales.
  • allowing companies to analyze in real-time online conversations to assess the effectiveness of the firm’s products or initiatives.
  • providing firms a way to provide the information in real time to manage risk by getting ahead of negative events, not allowing others to tell their stories for them.

The power of social media is something that was unimaginable even 10 years ago. But, today it can empower an entrepreneurial startup with the same brand-building abilities as the world’s largest and most well-established company. When approached with an enterprise risk management perspective, organizations can create value by balancing the power of social media engagement with its associated risks. To find out more about The Risk Institute’s perspective on enterprise risk management, visit fisher.osu.edu/risk.

To find out more about The Risk Institute’s Executive Education Risk Series, or to register for the upcoming session on Demand Uncertainty on April 30, 2015, visit our webpage.