April 2008

An authentic organization, very simply, is an organization whose identity, image and actions are congruent with each other. Identity is reflected in image and actions, Image accurately describes identity and actions, and actions express identity and image.

How can you know whether and how your organization is authentic?

It takes a deep inquiry and thoughtful process to answer that question thoroughly, and to be frank, I haven’t worked it all out clearly enough to post it yet. But, in the meantime, I propose a provisional, “quick & dirty” way to assess your organization’s authenticity.

Keep in mind….

Consider, first, that authenticity is in the eye of the beholder. Based on what you know about your organization, based on what you’ve experienced of your organization, you are the judge of whether it is authentic.

Second, consider that authenticity is not an achievement. It is not an end state at which the organization arrives. Authenticity is a dynamic process for sustaining alignment - for staying real, staying true, staying honest, and securing meaning.

Third, remember that assessing an organization’s authenticity depends on knowing that organization. You need to have some basic sense of what makes your organization distinctive and what defines your organization. An organization’s identity is something that is expressed and can be known through identity beliefs, through image, and through action, either one at a time or simultanously.

Identity Questions

To establish a basic sense of your organization, you need to answer (however provisionally) these 3 identity questions:

1. Who do we believe we are as an organization?
2. How do we present ourselves?
3. What do we do and how do we do it?

Ideally, the answers to these questions would be pretty similar. If they were similar, you’d probably judge your organization to be reasonably authentic. But similarity only tells you whether (or to what degree) these different expressions of the organization are congruent.

What you really need to know is how the organization is authentic -where the points of congruence are, and how the organization is not authentic - where there is discord between beliefs, image and actions.

Authenticity Questions

To assess how your organization is authentic, answer these 3 authenticity questions:

1. How do our actions as an organization reflect our beliefs about ourselves and the claims we make about ourselves to others?
2. How do we express our beliefs about ourselves as an organization in our claims and in our actions?
3. How do our claims about ourselves as an organization reflect who we believe we are and what we do?

Your answers to these questions give you a place to begin.

 

 

 

The American Red Cross has appointed a new CEO, Gail J. McGovern. McGovern, currently a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School, has many years of experince at for profit and nonprofit organizations.

Announcements of the new CEO mention the trials of the American Red Cross, noting that the organization has had 7 CEOs in the last seven years. None of these CEOs have been able to salvage the organization’s reputation or stabilize its financial status. Currently, the Red Cross is restructuring its organization and laying off over 1,000 employees.

Ms. McGovern acknowledges the challenges, “I’m hoping that I can bring my background and experience to the organization and help lead us to financial stability and growth.”

In addition to her corporate leadership, Ms. McGovern also has many years of volunteer experience, mainly in fund raising. Among the organizations for which she raised money is the Childrens’ Hospital in Boston.

Because the reputation of the Red Cross has been damaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and a scandalous resignation of the previous CEO, the American Red Cross needs public relations opportunities. It needs a chance to refresh its brand, to increase brand awareness, and to make people feel good about the American Red Cross again.

Given that Ms. McGovern has already successfully raised funds for a Childrens’ Hospital, and since the Columbus Children’s Hospital has achieved so much press with their recent cobranding effort, why not try the same thing with the American Red Cross?

What if Abercrombie & Fitch gave the American Red Cross a tidy sum of money, say $10-$20 million, to help with their $200 million operating deficit? The Red Cross could knowledge this gift by renaming one of their chapters, or perhaps their headquarters building in Washington, DC. They could rename it something like:

“Abercrombie & Fitch Red Cross Center
for Help in Emergencies“

This cobranding would bring Abercrombie & Fitch more notoriety, a characteristic that seems critical to their public image. And, the American Red Cross would receive much needed funding. In addition, this may make the A&F Red Cross more attractive to potential volunteers, especially young men between the ages of 14 — 28.

Just think who the Red Cross Abercrombie & Fitch Chapter could recruit now!

Thanks to Elrina for the photograph and the April fool’s joke that came with it.

[[Disclaimer: I'm kidding. Sort of.]]

 Of all the current conversations about authenticity and organizations, none is more vibrant- and confused- than the conversation that mingles authenticity, authentic brands and authentic organizations.

The Harvard Business Review March 2008 issue has a case by David Weinberger about the fictional Hunsk Engines, entitled “Authenticity: Is it Real or is it Marketing?“   This case offers a great context for beginning to untangle the relationship between brands, organizations and authenticity.

The new VP of Marketing at Hunsk, Marty, sees that sales are down. He concludes that the Hunsk motorcycle brand is no longer vital because the brand has lost its authenticity. His overall goal is to restore the authenticity of the Hunsk motorcycle brand/product. To do this, Marty plans to address issues of marketing, sales, product development, and customer service.

The problem is that Marty also believes that he needs to change the Hunsk organization itself, not just the conventional marketing functions. Marty makes two wrong assumptions about relationship between brand authenticity and organizational authenticity, that 1) The authenticity of a product/brand depends on the authenticity of the organization, and 2) The attributes (qualities) of the brand are inherited from the attributes of the organization. These two assumptions lead him astray, and he sets up an action plan that won’t get the job done. Why is he wrong?

Assumption 1:
The authenticity of a product/brand depends on the authenticity of the organization.

If it were true that the authenticity of a product/brand depends on the authenticity of the organization, it would make sense to try to influence the organization’s authenticity. But Marty confuses brand authenticity and organizational authenticity.

Brand Authenticity and Organizational Authenticity are two distinct and different evaluations.

Brand Authenticity depends on consumers’ perceptions of a product. For a brand, authenticity is the perception of ‘real’ness. Hunsk motorcycles no longer feel real. The product/brand has lost its authenticity because consumers no longer experience Hunsk motorcycles as real-  they feel a disconnect between what they experience and what they expect or hope to experience. Marty’s challenge is to restore (customers’ perceptions of) the product’s authenticity as they-the customers- experience it.

Organizational Authenticity depends on stakeholders perceptions of the congruence between who the organization is, how it presents itself, and how it acts. An organization isn’t authentic when it has the same attributes as its brands. It is authentic when its identity, image and action are congruent.

Brand authenticity and organizational authenticity are independent. The authenticity of the brand — whether the brand delivers the experience that it claims it will for consumers — does not depend on whether the organization is who it claims to be, or whether it acts in ways that it reflects who it is. An authentic organization can produce an inauthentic brand, and an inauthentic organization can produce an authentic brand.

Because Marty fails to separate brand authenticity and organizational authenticity, he diverts his attention from issues directly related to the customers’ experience of the Hunsk brand/product. Instead, he goes directly to work on the organization. And, in addition to focusing on the organization instead of the consumers’ experience, Marty just assumes he knows what Hunsk Engines needs “to be”. He believes that Hunsk as an organization needs to be more like their brand/product’s promise. Therefore, Marty wants the organization to acquire as part of its culture and identity some of the attributes of the Hunsk products/brand. He also wants Hunsk employees to have the same qualities and enthusiasms as Hunsk customers. As Marty himself says, “We need a management team that’s got the same DNA as our customers.”

In other words, Marty wants all of the managers at Hunsk to “live the brand”.

   Marty believes that an inauthentic organization causes the brand to seem inauthentic to customers. But as Gilmore and Pine say, “No amount of talk about being a real company can substitute for offering actual experiences that personally engage customers.” It is not the attributes of the organization but the quality of customers’ experiences with the product/brand that make the brand authentic.

If Marty really wanted to lead the organization to be more authentic…

Holding aside the question of whether or not Hunsk Engines needs to be more like the Hunsk motorcycle brand, Marty can’t just assume (unilaterally, no less) that he can make the organization more authentic by adjusting a few of its attributes. Who knows whether the qualities that Marty wants to instill into Hunsk Engines will help them align in their identity, image, and actions?

If Marty really wanted to make Hunsk Engines more authentic, his first step should be to focus on the three elements that provide the foundation for organizational authenticity: identity, image, and actions. His second step should be to ask three questions to assess the organization’s authenticity, preparing to involve identity, image, and action simultaneously to increase organizational authenticity.

Marty wants to instill the brand/product’s attributes into the organization not only to make Hunsk a more authentic company, but also because of his second assumption:

Assumption 2:
The attributes of the brand/product are inherited from the attributes of the organization.

If it were true that an organization passes on its own identity attributes to its brands/products, then it makes sense to want the organization to have the attributes itself. Working on the organization’s identity even starts to seem like an additional lever for getting certain attributes in/with/for the brand.

But consider how, for many kinds of brands, the organization’s identity is irrelevant. Brand X shampoo makes your hair feel shinier, bouncier, and sexier; or it doesn’t. Whether it does or doesn’t is independent of the attributes and the identity of the organization making the shampoo.

The assumption that brands inherit the attributes of their organization’s identity ignores the fact that a brand is something an organization creates. Certainly, in the process of creating a brand/product, the organization can use its organizational reputation/image to help construct the brand’s identity. However, this is a choice, not a requirement. Marketers need to remember that:

 

Branding is not a reproductive process.
Branding is a creative process.

 

Brands/products do not automatically inherit the qualities of the organization’s identity. The attributes of a brand are not derived or directly descended from the organization’s identity.

The attributes of a brand are designed in
through the marketing process.

 

Sometimes the entire brand identity is created by the marketers themselves. Sometimes consumers and consumer communities create additional qualities for a brand that are beyond what marketers intentionally designed in. And, in some specific situation, consumers will impute attributes to a brand/product based on their assumptions about the organization itself (from their direct experience, from the organization’s reputation, from its other products, etc). In these specific situations, it is appropriate to say that “corporate culture needs to reflect the authenticity of the branding message it sends out”. However, the degree to which attributes of the organization are used to bolster claims about attributes of the brand’s identity is the result of decisions that marketers make.

The relationship between a brand identity and an organization’s identity is the outcome of a creative branding process.

Brand authenticity is ‘rendered’ through skillful marketing.

Organizational authenticity is sustained through skillful management.