Lessons Learned from Week 4 of Brand Management

We had Nordstrom's CMO visit our class, and it was interesting to hear about the "Nordie" culture and what that means for their marketing efforts. My personal experiences with the stores haven't revealed to me anything special about their culture, but maybe that's just the LA stores.

Grow Must-do #2: Build your culture around your ideal

• One team, one dream (Saatchi)
  
• Largest P&G ad agency
  
• Lovemarks (brands that elicit love)
  
• Be clear and explicit about what ideal is what stand for
  
• Stand for something
  
• Cover Girl coming back to ideal
  
• Use every opportunity to train and do post mortem after each ad meeting (what learned, what could be done better, how excited)
  
• 10 culture builders
  
• Reveal brand ideal and operationalize it
  
• Be clear about what you stand for
  
• Design your organization for what it needs to win
  
• Get your team right quickly
  
• Champion innovation of all kinds
  
• Set standards very high
  
• Train all the time
  
• Do a few symbolic things to create excitement about what is important
  
• Think and act like a winner
  
• Live your desired legacy
  

Grow: How Pampers changed the world

• Slowdown globally
  
• Focus on dryness
  
• Missed Pull-Ups
  
• Male-dominated, engineering culture
  
• Disparate, international leadership that didn’t cooperate
  
• Sought answers from moms themselves to rediscover brand ideal
  
• Pampers Baby Stages of Development line of diapers
  
• Created useful website for moms

Method (company)

• Keeping culture weird
  
• Hiring question: how will keep it weird
  
• Open workspace, wikiwall post-its
  
• Wacky job titles people pick themselves
  
• Culture book
  

Southwest

• “Don’t try to learn your job. 1st priority to get to know your people.”
• Rapper for GAAP rules at Southwest annual meeting
  

Zappos

• No call times tracked
  
• No sales-based goals for reps
  
• Culture book
  

Nordstrom

• #1 goal at Nordstrom: deliver excellent customer service
  
• Relevancy really important (close to what customers want)
  
• Story of finding diamond ring that customer lost
  
• Everyone is about the customer (including security, janitors)