Enron, the infamous and scandal-ridden energy company synonymous with bad fat cat behaviour had four brand vales: Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence.
Instantly forgettable and yet so ironic as they are, these ‘values’ were designed to serve as the tent poles of Enron’s corporate identity and in theory, as guidance for how its employees should behave. What’s more striking, particularly for those in marketing, is how horribly familiar the exercise is and how worthless those four words are.
Virtually every company now feels at some point the burning desire to inflict on its staff words that ‘embody our culture’ or some such codswallop. A sort of corporate virtue signalling for the business world, along with CSR and literally anything your HR department sends out.
Anyone who’s worked in an office will have, in all likelihood, come in to contact with this nonsense. It might come in the shape of a small poster in the toilets at work, weirdly telling you that they really value collaboration (as you urinate), or maybe you’ve been trapped in a ‘session’ to define these values as you contemplate suicide.
I have fairly recently experienced the brand values of ‘HUMAN’ and ‘TOGETHERNESS’ writ large on huge white pillars in a massive office that seems to literally suck the life out of you as you enter as one by one the Winston Smiths clock-watch their life disappear out of the window.
I’ve attended interminably long sessions myself, where the group is required to swallow any honesty, pride and self respect in order to agree with the proceedings. I have witnessed organisations treat staff with utter contempt, sanction overseas child labour in the name of shareholder dividends, and then, in a heartbeat, get all excited as they tell us they’re all about ‘people’.
The real embodiment often occurs when some glassy eyed, fixed grin marketing Gollum stands in front of an apathetic audience of co-workers while a stultifying bland PowerPoint presentation with the word ‘BRAVERY’ glares back on a large screen behind them.
“We’re all about being brave as a company aren’t we,” they say, as various employees fantasise about bravely standing up and lobbing their chair at the screen, catapulting the marketeer onto the floor, “and you might ask yourself, how can I be brave in my job? Well, maybe you have an idea on how to improve productivity, be brave and tell your boss!”
One marketing drone’s brave is another employee’s career suicide.
There’s a cycle to these things, it mysteriously follows senior management changes, a new Marketing Director, a new HR Director or CEO. And so it often comes accompanied by massive and painful organisational changes that hurl teams into despair and insecurity.
Brand values float around the corporate sea like a Marie Celeste, waiting for the next time a new board is in place or some HR genius needs a project to fill his or her week in order to justify their existence and avoid actually helping out.
Of course, aside from eye rolls amongst the employees, brand values do provide other tangible results. Brand values are most likely to blame for the appallingly misjudged social media feeds of many companies. Train companies have ignored the fact that every visitor to their Twitter feeds is there to either complain, find out about delays or both.
Despite this known fact, they’ll fill their feed with smiley faces, jokey responses and sarcasm while we, the customers, have no choice but to endure this puerile experiment as we try desperately to escape. It’s like doing a stretch for life on a prison boat with the Krankies at the helm barking over the Tannoy.
As Mary Wakefield pointed out recently in The Spectator amongst others, another scourge is an inanimate object shouting at us about recycling. “Put me in the bin when you’re done’ or ‘I like to be recycled’. And it won’t be long until a bottle of Red Bull actually speaks to us, telling us not to throw it in the wrong bin.
Oh yes Red Bull, the darling of branding agencies and brand marketing departments. They’re raised up as the model for branding success and the model for how a company’s brand can transcend the usual attempts. The difference is of course, for all their online brilliance, their product doesn’t sell online. Every time I watch another ‘virtuoso campaign’ I wonder, what does a long distance lorry driver or clapped out clubber make of that Go-Pro’ed BMX jump when they pull into a Shell station?
Another example comes from a well-known brand that, at an all staff away day told the 1000+ people present to stand up. They followed up with questions to whittle the audience down, for example; ‘those of you born in July stay standing, everyone else sit down’. After minutes of this, 12 or so people were left standing, full of fear and dread that they’d be singled out and made to come up on stage. A mortifying and anxious position for most of us to be in. The senior management running the exercise then delivered their appalling punchline. Ok, you can all sit down too. But that feeling you had there of nervousness and excitement, that’s what we want you to feel every day working here.’ This is true. This happened. Person after person in the audience looked at one another with a face that said, I don’t want to feel nervous walking in to the office.
That’s not to say companies can’t embody values that are positively affecting their employees and customers. The examples however, are few and far between. More often than not it’s a lame and cack-handed attempt to dupe employees because, and that’s the great cosmic joke of it all, we want to believe you’re all about people or you value humility and honesty.
Then the paraphernalia starts to arrive. A mug marked ‘Innovative’, the posters, those weird hanging banners above desks that remind you of ones saying ‘Coffee and Biscuits’ in Asda, powerpoint templates are changed, indecipherable diagrams (commonly a pyramid) are presented, and often, the awful ‘brand book’.
I sat in a meeting once where a discussion was had about producing a 100-page brand book of glossy images and slogans that were empty and meaningless to the vast majority of employees. They would value the brand and feel more loyal to it one suspects if the near £1m cost found its way into their pockets or working conditions.
Another place I worked at devoted pages and pages on their ignored intranet explaining to people how to speak and write to people. Encouraging informal greetings, and using positive and ‘doing’ words.
It all ends up the same way. In months there will be an elephant’s graveyard of branding bones. Cardboard boxes of company T-shirts under empty desks where a marketing exec once sat and those hanging banners have faded in the sun.
It isn’t the fault of the values; you can’t really go around blaming inanimate objects without someone thinking your lift doesn’t go to the top any more. The issue tends to be that someone along the line, and usually at the top, doesn’t actually care. Instead the whole thing is a box-ticking exercise without any real commitment or sacrifice intended.
Cultures are formed by teams, teams with strong leaders and not by some personality-deficient Martian telling you to be energetic or, restlessly innovative. If you really want to change a team’s culture, ignore the brand books, stop rolling your eyes at the acronym-filled w*nkword bingo and the 1984-lite directing, reject it all and create your own.
