Brian Chesky says company culture and brand are inseparable. Strong internal beliefs show up as the brand customers see, and employees become evangelists for it. Without a core belief, a company is just a commodity.
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We don't talk about culture and brand very much. They are two sides of the same coin. So culture, like the principles and the beliefs that you have inside the company that you want people to be aligned with long term. And whatever happens inside the company eventually comes out. You can't hold it in. And brand is really the promise outside the company that everyone identifies with. And so I think having a clear mission and making sure that you know that mission and making sure that mission comes through the company, it's probably the most important thing you can do for both culture and values. And then the second thing you need to know is that your brand evangelists are your employees. Companies that hire employees or people that are deeply passionate create companies that customers are really, really passionate about. And those are the companies that have strong brands. And so Zappos had a really strong brand because they have a strong culture. And a lot of companies at Google, they care deeply about the culture. And brand is really the connection of you with your customers. And so if you have a really strong culture, then the brand will come through. The final thing to say about brand is a lot of people, when they talk about their brand, they talk about what they sell. So if you're Apple, one way of doing it is say we sell computers and our new screens are larger and it's faster and they talk about bits and bytes. I remember Steve Jobs had this really important talk where he says, the way to win, this is 1997, when he first came back, wasn't to talk about bits and bytes. The way to win is to talk about what we value and our core values. We believe people with passion could change the world. That was how we introduced the Think different campaign. Apple before they had this huge renaissance which became the most valuable company in the world, they did the Think different campaign, which is basically saying, this is what we believe in. And if you buy an Apple computer, you're also saying, I believe in this too. And there has to be, I think, a deeper core belief. And if that doesn't happen, you're a utility, and the utilities get sold at commodity prices.
