Your Real Brand

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Written by Marshall Goldsmith and Kelly Goldsmith, hosted on Chief Executive Magazine

Align what you say outside with what you live inside.

In working with top executive teams, we often see leaders get lost in the machinery of branding. They spend time, energy and money perfecting logos, taglines and marketing campaigns, convinced these external elements are the brand itself. This focus is backward. Your brand isn’t just a promise you make to the market: it’s the living culture you create, embody and enforce every day inside your organization.

Two of our great friends, Martin Lindstrom and Marcus Collins, are the world’s leading thinkers on branding. We love their practical ideas for what branding should mean, both inside and outside the organization. Martin and I (MG) recently worked together with one of my CEO coach-ing clients. His team was spending hours agonizing over slogans and trademark colors. They had spent almost no time connecting their external brand with the day-to-day reality of the thousands of human beings who work there. In a few minutes, Martin explained how this disconnect might well lead to increased employee cynicism, not increased employee engagement.

What we have learned from Martin and Marcus is that a real brand is not just an image you project for the outside world. It is a living, breathing reality reflected daily in organizational life. If your culture and values are not consistent with the external brand, the people who do the work know it. Flashy external branding, no matter how clever, does more harm than good. An authentic brand that promises less is far more powerful than a phony brand that promises more.

Marcus defines culture as the “operating system” of human behavior. People don’t just buy products; they buy into beliefs, shared by like-minded individuals. For a brand to truly resonate, it must cultivate a strong, authentic culture of shared conviction internally. Your employees are your first, most crucial “believ-ers.” If they don’t subscribe to the brand’s core purpose, how will your customers? As we always emphasize, organizational values are demonstrated in the behaviors of leaders—not words on a plaque. The support you hope to gain from customers must first be demonstrated—and lived—by leaders and employees.

This extends to every touchpoint; a concept Martin explores with his focus on sensory branding and “Small Data.” If external marketing promises innovation and efficiency, but internal processes are mired in bureaucracy and frustration, you’re creating sensory dissonance. The “feel” of working at your company—ease of collaboration, responsiveness of leadership, clarity of purpose—is as much a part of your brand as any customer-facing interaction. A culture of inefficiency, poor communication or hypocrisy is a direct assault on your brand equity, regardless of how glossy your advertisements are.

Leaders often miss this crucial link. They talk about “brand values” in meetings but fail to ensure these values are integrated into daily operations, decision-making and employee experience. A leader preaching innovation but punishing experimentation, sends a clear internal message: “Do as I say, not as I do.” This erodes trust, stifles engagement and ultimately undermines any external brand efforts.

The real power of a brand lies in its integrity, the alignment between what it says it is and what it actually is. A truly strong brand doesn’t merely inspire customers; it inspires its people to live its values, creating a chain of trust from the inside out. This requires leadership by example, a deep commitment to an authentic internal culture and the courage to ensure every internal process and interaction reflects the brand’s highest ideals.

The people who work in your company are not naïve. They know that you, as a leader, will not “live” the company’s values every day. They know no leader is perfect. They do expect you to take the values seriously and do your best to be a role model for how you want them to behave. The same principle applies to external branding. Your people know your organization will not always be as wonderful as your external brand. They just want you to be authentic and to try.