What is your organization? Most clients struggle to answer the first question from the Brand Pyramid. You'd expect that any company would have a good answer, but they almost never do. Why is this?
There are three main reasons.
In our work with healthcare organizations, there are a few emergent challenges that are worth noting. This post relates only to healthcare service brands like hospitals and nursing services and is not meant to apply to healthcare product brands or pharma or medical device companies, which operate differently.
Keith Cartwright provides an analysis of how advertising agencies will need to move forward if they intend to reap the benefits of greater inclusivity.
“Sympathy is fine. Empathy is better. Sacrifice is hard.” he says.
This struck me as a very succinct—if on further consideration problematic—summation of the journey we will all need to go on if we are to overcome the racism that infects much of American business.
It is unnecessary to mention that a lot is happening in America right now. We are in the middle of both the pandemic and the national mobilization around Black Lives Matter. It is an act of will not to speak up, not to enter this conversation. But it is so easy to be thoughtless or to think of one's innocence in all this … only to be reminded not so quietly, “But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963.
As I check the numbers each day on the New York Times map of the virus, it’s hard to comprehend the sadness this data illustration represents. The numbers grow, often adding zeros. Behind each zero are thousands of individual names, fascinating stories, dearly held passions, truncated hopes, an end to the delicate ripples each human life sends out into the world.
There’s a tension that arises so frequently in museums that it seems natural and almost unavoidable: the curatorial team and the marketing (communications) team struggle to get along. Both groups are intimately involved with the customer but what they do with the customer and the nature of that interaction, however, are very different. This can lead to conflict between the two teams that are theoretically working toward the same goal.
In a recent workshop, the following discussion with a curator, in response to my setup that highly functional teams actively work to achieve shared goals, exposed a work dynamic with substantial consequences for organizational effectiveness.
While we've seen a small set of core values brought to life with our clients in the nonprofit and cultural sector, the reality is that core values are for everyone. We were able to test this principle recently running our workshop for the docuseries “Hustle” depicting the struggles of small business entrepreneurs in NYC.
