THE EXPRESSIVE ORGANISATION BEYOND IDENTITY
No Reason to Delay
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Chapter
Hans P Brandt, Managing Director, Total Identity Barbara Brian, Senior Advisor, Total Identity Peter Verburgt, Senior Advisor, Total Identity Jeroen Duijvestijn, former advisor to the Society and Enterprise Foundation
From Branding to Identity Thinking In recent years, branding has played a dominant role in the thinking about the relationship between a company and its environment. Whether the focus has been on the way in which a company visually presents itself, how it motivates its employees, or how an organisation communicates with the world around it, branding has been used to show what was special about a company, with a view to winning appreciation from those around it. This is now changing. Increasingly, branding is giving way to efforts focused on defining, cultivating and expressing the personality of organisations. The management of perception is giving way to providing insight into the ambitions of the organisation itself. The time when organisations could hide behind their brand name is now gone for good. Communication, behaviour and symbols are taking on new significance on the basis of identity. The focus has shifted to emotion, to identification, instead of making an impression; to commitment instead of profiling; to developing a relationship instead of giving in to impulses. Only then can an organisation be relevant to the world around it.
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Companies and institutions no longer communicate only with their stakeholders and vice versa. They have become learning organisations, seeking links to the market by continually adapting to their surroundings. When an organisation enters a dialogue in a fully transparent manner, this leads to efficient and flexible group processes inside and outside the organisation. This change creates the ideal context for innovation and creativity.
Identity is not an easy concept to grasp. Identity is the accepted distance to the ideal (the collective desire that is often unattainable). Identity is the ambition that can be attained because it can be made concrete, managed and verified. Ambition that is thinkable from an ethical perspective. By keeping the attainable, the thinkable—and thus reality—in sight, organisations can act from the vantage point of their identity. The necessity to act from a place of identity has stemmed from political and social developments. History shows, in a predictable pattern, how political/social tendencies influence the world of business and how business then adapts its marketing and communications to address these tendencies. Stairway to Heaven: the 1960s The 1960s heralded a period of freedom following the post-war years of reflection and rebuilding. People started to look to the future. Individualism reigned supreme. It was a time when the pill loosed the shackles of traditional religious and social mores. We wanted to make our own choices, live our own lives. Technological innovations encouraged this outlook: with the arrival of colour television and the landing on the moon, our worlds became larger and the opportunities for the individual were unlimited. Social progress quickened, and the economy boomed. Industry pushed full steam ahead to meet the demands of a steadily growing population that had increasing desires and needs. The different steps within the production process were increasingly coordinated better to offer just-in-time delivery. The mass media became a common repository of knowledge, telling us what was going on in other places. This resulted in social criticism for the first time in a long time. The war in Vietnam, the threat of the Cold War: everything was seen and assessed. Gradually, a feeling of realism supplanted the optimism of the early 1960s. The innocent cries of ‘flower power’ and ‘make love not war’ gave way to an underlying feeling of discontent. We wanted greater control, the ability to influence the direction of the events around us. This scenario could also be seen in the Dutch