Services For Organizations

Because your brand is everything your company does, it’s too important to be left to an agency or a marketing team alone. 

Your culture is too important to be separate from your brand.

Your business is too important to operate in parts and pieces.

Your brand and culture, together with your business strategy, drive results.

Your business impact comes from the fusion of your brand and culture working in synergy. Your people know this, your customers demand this, and your future depends on how well you achieve the integration of brand and culture with your business strategy.

After all, there’s nothing more powerful than a united group of souls ignited in a common cause with love at the core.

Business leaders want to know: What connects your brand and culture — and why does it matter?

Your brand defines what you believe; Your culture lives those beliefs. 

Your brand creates interest; Your culture creates trust.

Your brand shapes your stories; Your culture makes them believable.

Your brand makes promises that create expectations; Your culture delivers on them.

Your brand invites and engages customers; Your culture serves and cares for them.

Your brand carves out your market position; Your culture secures it.

Your brand attracts the right customers; Your culture creates loyalty.

After you understand what connects a brand with culture, the next question is: How do we make that happen?

That’s more complex to answer. Below is my framework for brand-culture integration that I share with my clients. If you want to know the details of how it works together and my framework for integration, let’s talk.

For comprehensive listing and pricing of my services and packages, download my Brand & Culture Advisory Services PDF.

How can we work together?

I believe that your brand and your people (including you, the leader) are your two most valuable business assets. My 25+ years of expertise is in helping leaders build belief-driven brands and cultures in the following ways:

• Brand evolution programs that cultivate and align your strategic business drivers into all aspects of your organization so your brand becomes unignorable.
• Culture evolution programs that tap into the intrinsic motivations of your team so your culture becomes a unified force that is integrated with your brand.
• Brand-Culture integration that fuses your business strategy with your brand and culture.
• Strategic planning for businesses, including off-sites and retreats, to create your business trajectory.
• Strategic marketing and brand guidance, including fractional CMO duties to help businesses attract more of the right loyal customers.
• One-on-one leadership guidance and mastermind groups for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

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Working with Steven Morris

• You work with me and get my expertise, not an agency of creatives who don’t do strategy for a living or a junior member of a consulting firm.
• My work is customized for you; while I have proven and time-tested frameworks, I don’t use a one-size-fits-all process.
• I’ll work with you until it’s right; I don’t withhold access, insight, strategies, or a set number of meeting limitations.
• I’ll bring 25+ years of real-world insights and learnings from other client-partners and industry sectors to our relationship.
• I take the complex and simplify it; then help you activate it. I provide you with an outcome set that is clear and actionable for your team.
• I get results and drive outcomes. While much of brand and culture work deals with ideas, beliefs, soft skills, and behaviors; my work is highly pragmatic and results-driven.

My Outcome-Driven Approach

Having worked with more than 275 brands (global, national, and regional), I know that achieving results is why I’m hired. My branded business approach creates organizational integrity between your brand, culture, and business strategy.

Typical engagement outcomes include:

• Attracting and retaining more of the right customers because your brand position and offerings are built to deliver on promises.
• Increasing competitive advantage and high-ground positioning by shaping the right branded business strategy that improves market relevance and brand differentiation.
• Creating a value-based through-line that tethers your Employee Experience (EX) with your Customer Experience (CX) which builds deeper trust and greater market resilience.
• Building a people-first employee brand that attracts, invites, engages, and retains more of the right employees, increases productivity, collaboration, and innovation, and reduces unwanted turnover.
• Casting a fresh vision for your organization that enables your company to achieve long-term business success, all while building on your organizational heritage.

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Brand Evolution

Services below can be delivered a la carte, or as a comprehensive Brand Evolution Package.

• Brand Perception Audit: Qualitative & quantitative research to identify brand perception; analyze; identify & craft evolved perception opportunities.
• Market Position Audit: Qualitative & quantitative research of current market position against top 5 competitors in a single industry; create strong & defensible market position; analyze; identify ways to attract more of the right customers.
• Brand Beliefs Matrix: Work with business leaders to identify & harvest core branded-business beliefs (purpose, persona, vision, promise); craft an actionable messaging matrix to activate the business beliefs in the culture and brand.
• Cultural Values Audit & Creation: Analyze the actionability of current values (if any) or identify core values of the business; Cultivate values stories; craft core values in the brand vernacular; activation plan for core values into the culture as an operating system.

Brand Expression (Strategic Creative, Design & Digital):

Working with a team of world-class creative partners, I direct, oversee, and ensure the strategic design of brand expression elements. This includes brand naming, brand identity, brand guidelines, marketing messaging, websites, and a full suite of brand expression elements. Costs vary depending on client needs and the complexity of these needs.

Business & Marketing Strategy Guidance: (Individual Services)

• Product or Service Innovation Workshop: Evaluate and ideate new or evolved product or service offerings through this hands-on workshop (half-day or full-day); evaluate the market potential for identifying products and align them within the current product or service offerings.
• Business Threats Assessment (“Put Ourselves Out-of-Business” Workshop): Analyze the competitive threats to the business through this hands-on workshop; evaluate & devise counter-measures to protect vital business interests; prioritize actionable solutions to shore up business threats.
• Brand Position & Lead Generation: Review & analyze your brand market position to make the service firm less replaceable; evaluate business development flow; devise an optimal system for predictable lead generation.
• Marketing Strategy: Review & analyze current marketing strategy; evaluate strategic marketing opportunities; devise an optimal marketing strategy to attract more of the right customers.
• Customer Journey Mapping: Evaluate the current customer journey (awareness, consideration, acquisition, service, loyalty); devise an optimal Customer Journey Map with steps, touchpoints, and departmental functions to attract and retain more of the right customers.
• Advising CMO: Activate my hands-on marketing expertise as an Advising CMO on a retainer basis for 3- to 6-month intervals; Ideal for small businesses who want to elevate their marketing practices for intervention and short-term intervals.