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Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest Companies
A fresh, clarifying, and actionable perspective on two of the most misunderstood concepts in business: brand and culture.
Independently, brand and culture are powerful, unsung business drivers. But, as author Denise Lee Yohn reveals, when you fuse the two together to create an interdependent and mutually-reinforcing relationship between them (what she calls fusion), you create new growth that isn't possible by simply cultivating one or the other alone.
Through detailed case studies from some of the world's greatest companies (Sony, Frito-Lay, Oakley, FedEx, Airbnb, Adobe, Salesforce, LinkedIn, etc.), interviews with industry leaders, and insights from Denise's 25+ years working with world class brands, FUSION provides readers with a detailed roadmap for increasing competitiveness, creating measurable value for customers and employees, and future-proofing their business.
Independently, brand and culture are powerful, unsung business drivers. But, as author Denise Lee Yohn reveals, when you fuse the two together to create an interdependent and mutually-reinforcing relationship between them (what she calls fusion), you create new growth that isn't possible by simply cultivating one or the other alone.
Through detailed case studies from some of the world's greatest companies (Sony, Frito-Lay, Oakley, FedEx, Airbnb, Adobe, Salesforce, LinkedIn, etc.), interviews with industry leaders, and insights from Denise's 25+ years working with world class brands, FUSION provides readers with a detailed roadmap for increasing competitiveness, creating measurable value for customers and employees, and future-proofing their business.
228 pages, Hardcover
Published March 13, 2018
27 people are currently reading
977 people want to read
About the author
Denise Lee Yohn
7 books33 followersBlending a fresh perspective, twenty-five years of experience working with world-class brands including Sony, Frito-Lay, and Burger King, and a talent for inspiring audiences, Denise Lee Yohn is a leading authority on building and positioning exceptional brands.
Denise initially cultivated her brand-building approaches through several high-level positions in advertising and client-side marketing. She served as lead strategist at advertising agencies for Burger King and Land Rover and as the marketing leader and analyst for Jack in the Box restaurants and Spiegel catalogs. Denise went on to head Sony Electronic Inc.’s first ever brand office, where she was the vice president/general manager of brand and strategy and garnered major corporate awards.
An influential writer, Denise penned the book What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest (Jossey-Bass) and the new book Extraordinary Experiences: What Great Retail and Restaurant Brands Do. She enjoys challenging readers to think differently about brand-building. She contributes the monthly column Brand New Perspectives to QSR Magazine and has published work in numerous outlets, including Harvard Business Review, Advertising Age, and OPEN Forum. In 2008 she launched her blog, brand as business bites™, which the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) named as one of the top 20 marketing blogs.
With her expertise and personal approach, Denise delivers an array of inspirational workshops, presentations, and keynote addresses to business leaders in all industries. When she’s not writing or speaking, she serves as the brand director for TEDx San Diego and sits on the board of directors for a branch of the YMCA.
Outside of her professional roles, Denise counts hiking Mount Kilimanjaro, dancing with a professional ballet company, and flying a helicopter as some of her greatest life experiences.
Denise initially cultivated her brand-building approaches through several high-level positions in advertising and client-side marketing. She served as lead strategist at advertising agencies for Burger King and Land Rover and as the marketing leader and analyst for Jack in the Box restaurants and Spiegel catalogs. Denise went on to head Sony Electronic Inc.’s first ever brand office, where she was the vice president/general manager of brand and strategy and garnered major corporate awards.
An influential writer, Denise penned the book What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest (Jossey-Bass) and the new book Extraordinary Experiences: What Great Retail and Restaurant Brands Do. She enjoys challenging readers to think differently about brand-building. She contributes the monthly column Brand New Perspectives to QSR Magazine and has published work in numerous outlets, including Harvard Business Review, Advertising Age, and OPEN Forum. In 2008 she launched her blog, brand as business bites™, which the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) named as one of the top 20 marketing blogs.
With her expertise and personal approach, Denise delivers an array of inspirational workshops, presentations, and keynote addresses to business leaders in all industries. When she’s not writing or speaking, she serves as the brand director for TEDx San Diego and sits on the board of directors for a branch of the YMCA.
Outside of her professional roles, Denise counts hiking Mount Kilimanjaro, dancing with a professional ballet company, and flying a helicopter as some of her greatest life experiences.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 16, 2018
Denise Lee Yohn’s book, Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies, makes a strong argument for why culture and brand are the biggest drivers of great results in business and explains the key strategies for brand-culture fusion for achieving it.
Overarching Purpose: Your “Why” - A company’s purpose is its why — why it does what it does, why it exists. Having a meaningful purpose or being a “purpose-driven” company has become a popular notion in business today, and with good reason. In today’s cluttered, ultracompetitive, choice-overloaded world, each company must have a clear reason for being. What difference in the world are you being called to make?
These companies’ aspirations are bold and inspiring yet definitive.
• Zappos: To deliver happiness to the world.
• Sony: To create technologies that inspire people to dream and find joy.
• Apple: To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.
Core Values: Your “How” - Your values should describe the collective attitudes and beliefs that you desire all employees to hold, translate those into specific actions and decisions that they should make, and then in turn show how those behaviors produce customer experiences that define and differentiate your brand.
“Do these core values capture the essence of our culture and brand?”
“Do they set us apart from companies like us?”
“Do they help our employees understand how they are expected to think and act?”
Once you know the type of brand you have or desire to build, the next step is to identify the kind of culture required to deliver on it. Each brand type requires a specific organizational culture to thrive. If you want to be an innovative brand, for example, then your culture must encourage a test-and-learn mentality among your employees. You should determine the three top core values that correspond to each brand type. Inventiveness, experimentation and continuous improvement are the key core values needed to support an innovative brand.
Take the free online Brand-Culture Fusion Assessment (http://deniseleeyohn.com/fusion-asses...)
Lead the Change - The next step is to take leadership responsibility for cultivating your desired culture.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Strong communication is well recognized as the key to great leadership. The keys to successful leadership communication are consistency, simplicity, storytelling and relevance.
Actions speak louder than words. What you say matters, but just as important, what you do provides models of action for your people and telegraphs how committed you are to aligning your culture with your brand.
Engage every leader. Organization-wide alignment is critical to integrating your culture and brand. Executives at the top of an organization must hold accountable their direct reports for cultivating the desired culture, those managers in turn must do the same for theirs and so on.
Reinforce your culture with the right people decisions. People decisions –– who to hire, fire and promote –– are perhaps the most visible way leaders can build their culture and align it with the company’s brand identity. When you rely on your core values to make people decisions, you make sure the right people are on your bus.
When it comes to fully integrating and aligning your culture and brand, how you run your organization is just as important as how you design it.
Create Culture-Changing Employee Experiences - “Creating a compelling employee experience” was named by Forbes as the No. 1 HR trend in 2017, and 70 percent of executives around the world surveyed by Deloitte’s Human Capital Group said employee experience (EX) was an important or very important trend.
Sweat the Small Stuff - To nurture your desired culture, you also must focus on the smaller, tactical but equally significant aspects of your organization: (1) rituals and artifacts — things your organization regularly does or creates to commemorate or symbolize what’s important to it; and (2) employee policies and procedures — the codes of conduct, rules of engagement and other instructions that set the tone and guidelines for working at the organization.
Promote Your Culture Through Policies and Procedures
Follow these steps to leverage company policies and procedures to cultivate your desired culture:
Step 1: First, establish policies and procedures that are right for your organization and that reflect the uniqueness of your culture.
Step 2: Design a compelling employee handbook or guide - to codify your policies and procedures into a guide or handbook that is designed as if it were a communications piece for an external audience.
Step 3: You must then disseminate the guide and train employees on the policies and procedures in it.
To engage employees’ hands and feet — their actions, that is — a toolkit might contain decision guides, process flowcharts, workbooks or mobile apps containing role-playing exercises or other activities that help them easily align their decisions and actions with your desired culture.
Overarching Purpose: Your “Why” - A company’s purpose is its why — why it does what it does, why it exists. Having a meaningful purpose or being a “purpose-driven” company has become a popular notion in business today, and with good reason. In today’s cluttered, ultracompetitive, choice-overloaded world, each company must have a clear reason for being. What difference in the world are you being called to make?
These companies’ aspirations are bold and inspiring yet definitive.
• Zappos: To deliver happiness to the world.
• Sony: To create technologies that inspire people to dream and find joy.
• Apple: To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.
Core Values: Your “How” - Your values should describe the collective attitudes and beliefs that you desire all employees to hold, translate those into specific actions and decisions that they should make, and then in turn show how those behaviors produce customer experiences that define and differentiate your brand.
“Do these core values capture the essence of our culture and brand?”
“Do they set us apart from companies like us?”
“Do they help our employees understand how they are expected to think and act?”
Once you know the type of brand you have or desire to build, the next step is to identify the kind of culture required to deliver on it. Each brand type requires a specific organizational culture to thrive. If you want to be an innovative brand, for example, then your culture must encourage a test-and-learn mentality among your employees. You should determine the three top core values that correspond to each brand type. Inventiveness, experimentation and continuous improvement are the key core values needed to support an innovative brand.
Take the free online Brand-Culture Fusion Assessment (http://deniseleeyohn.com/fusion-asses...)
Lead the Change - The next step is to take leadership responsibility for cultivating your desired culture.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Strong communication is well recognized as the key to great leadership. The keys to successful leadership communication are consistency, simplicity, storytelling and relevance.
Actions speak louder than words. What you say matters, but just as important, what you do provides models of action for your people and telegraphs how committed you are to aligning your culture with your brand.
Engage every leader. Organization-wide alignment is critical to integrating your culture and brand. Executives at the top of an organization must hold accountable their direct reports for cultivating the desired culture, those managers in turn must do the same for theirs and so on.
Reinforce your culture with the right people decisions. People decisions –– who to hire, fire and promote –– are perhaps the most visible way leaders can build their culture and align it with the company’s brand identity. When you rely on your core values to make people decisions, you make sure the right people are on your bus.
When it comes to fully integrating and aligning your culture and brand, how you run your organization is just as important as how you design it.
Create Culture-Changing Employee Experiences - “Creating a compelling employee experience” was named by Forbes as the No. 1 HR trend in 2017, and 70 percent of executives around the world surveyed by Deloitte’s Human Capital Group said employee experience (EX) was an important or very important trend.
Sweat the Small Stuff - To nurture your desired culture, you also must focus on the smaller, tactical but equally significant aspects of your organization: (1) rituals and artifacts — things your organization regularly does or creates to commemorate or symbolize what’s important to it; and (2) employee policies and procedures — the codes of conduct, rules of engagement and other instructions that set the tone and guidelines for working at the organization.
Promote Your Culture Through Policies and Procedures
Follow these steps to leverage company policies and procedures to cultivate your desired culture:
Step 1: First, establish policies and procedures that are right for your organization and that reflect the uniqueness of your culture.
Step 2: Design a compelling employee handbook or guide - to codify your policies and procedures into a guide or handbook that is designed as if it were a communications piece for an external audience.
Step 3: You must then disseminate the guide and train employees on the policies and procedures in it.
To engage employees’ hands and feet — their actions, that is — a toolkit might contain decision guides, process flowcharts, workbooks or mobile apps containing role-playing exercises or other activities that help them easily align their decisions and actions with your desired culture.
October 28, 2020
Organizational culture is one of the most talked about and written about topics in leadership literature these days. There is good reason this is true: Peter Drucker’s famous line says it best – “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
But as is often the case, once an important topic becomes trendy, so much is written about it that it is hard to find something truly new that illuminates the topic in an important way.
Hard, but not impossible.
Let me make it easier.
Read Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies.
Read more...
But as is often the case, once an important topic becomes trendy, so much is written about it that it is hard to find something truly new that illuminates the topic in an important way.
Hard, but not impossible.
Let me make it easier.
Read Fusion: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies.
Read more...
August 5, 2018
Read it thanks to Blinkist.
Absolutely loved it. I will have to re-read it again. This book just became an absolute staple for me!
The key message in these blinks:
Your company brand is a great source of power, as is your company culture. However, when fused together, these two resources can release truly cosmic energy. So, rather than thinking of your brand as merely external and your culture as merely internal, bring the two together, allowing them to interact and strengthen each other. This is the only way to ensure that customers truly engage with the brand and employees truly engage with the culture.
Suggested further reading:
Powerful by Patty McCord
Based on the work practices at Netflix, Powerful (2017) is a guide to building a work culture that can adapt to today’s fast-paced and ever-changing markets. It offers insights that are rooted in an unconventional way of managing people. You’ll discover eight practices of management that’ll help you create a successful work culture and business.
Absolutely loved it. I will have to re-read it again. This book just became an absolute staple for me!
The key message in these blinks:
Your company brand is a great source of power, as is your company culture. However, when fused together, these two resources can release truly cosmic energy. So, rather than thinking of your brand as merely external and your culture as merely internal, bring the two together, allowing them to interact and strengthen each other. This is the only way to ensure that customers truly engage with the brand and employees truly engage with the culture.
Suggested further reading:
Powerful by Patty McCord
Based on the work practices at Netflix, Powerful (2017) is a guide to building a work culture that can adapt to today’s fast-paced and ever-changing markets. It offers insights that are rooted in an unconventional way of managing people. You’ll discover eight practices of management that’ll help you create a successful work culture and business.
December 9, 2022
Fusion by Denise Lee Yohn is a gem of a book. Denise has spotted the need in business to have a great brand and have a great culture, but that isn’t new. What Denise as spotted in this digital age is that we need to fuse brand and culture, hence the name of the book Fusion.
Denise has also spotted a number of other modern attributes, that so many businesses seem to forget.
Today in business, we can all spot a BS mission statement from a mile off, employees today also want to have a higher purpose. Your customers too can spot BS a mile away, business today all market by saying “buy my product because we are great”, and of course as consumers we just ignore it.
To have an authentic brand, you have to let your employees free to be empowered and authentic on social media. Not sending out brochures and brochureware.
Denise makes some great suggestions and pointers for business in how to regain their place as a trusted, employee and customer centric brand.
Denise has also spotted a number of other modern attributes, that so many businesses seem to forget.
Today in business, we can all spot a BS mission statement from a mile off, employees today also want to have a higher purpose. Your customers too can spot BS a mile away, business today all market by saying “buy my product because we are great”, and of course as consumers we just ignore it.
To have an authentic brand, you have to let your employees free to be empowered and authentic on social media. Not sending out brochures and brochureware.
Denise makes some great suggestions and pointers for business in how to regain their place as a trusted, employee and customer centric brand.
September 8, 2021
Fornisce grandi spunti, ma è più fruibile per persone a livello dirigenziale che possono effettivamente attuare azioni correttive per l'azienda. Se si decide di intraprendere un percorso del genere sicuramente bisogna essere preparati a un cambiamento profondo all'interno dell'azienda, con investimento in tempo e risorse.
August 6, 2018
Байгуулгын дотоод соёл болоод сурталчилж буй брандинг хоёр хоршин байвал ямар гайхалтай үр дүнд хүргэж болохыг өөрийн 25 жилийн туршлагадаа үндэслэн энэ салбарт амжилт үзүүлж байгаа томоохон компаниудын жишээ нь дээр тайлбарласан нь чухал ойлголт өглөө.
August 7, 2018
Very good book, a must-read for business people, entrepreneurs, or anyone wanting to integrate what you sell to customers and what you sell to employees. Great advice on how to build a strong culture that will be obvious to customers and will lead to loyalty as well.
February 25, 2021
An excellent guide for developing an organizational culture and a solid corporate brand by combining both. Fusion explains the importance of having a unified purpose that will drive your organization internally and externally.
May 27, 2024
Quick and easy read on how to fuse your business' brand with its culture, with step by step instructions. It's interesting to see how this fusion is playing out in real time work my main employer, and I'm excited to see how my family's small business can benefit.
February 4, 2020
Overall it was just ok, there are some good ideas, but it was really dry and I struggled to get through it. The concept is sound though.
March 3, 2022
This topic is an important one, but the book felt boring to me.
February 6, 2019
Fusion is one of those books that all communications professionals would read and say, "Yes! That's what I've been saying all along!" Yohn does a great job of making the connection between culture and brand and the role of a leader in fusing the two together. A must-read for anyone working in corporate communications, leader development, public relations or corporate reputation management.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews