Businesses that work hard to maintain status quo risk to become ignored and irrelevant. The 7 most expensive words in business are:

This is how we’ve always done it.

These types of business build cultures that are cancerous to psychological health, optimum performance, competitiveness, ideas, and knowledge sharing. Organisations that place greater value on conforming than pushing beyond the standards suffer when there are changes outside the organisation’s control and business environment triggered by changes in price, consumer preference, or inflation. Conformity is an internal focus to the business. It is divorced from the customer and fails to actively find ways to improve the customer experience. It is provides a welcome gift to competitors to focus on satisfying the needs of your audience.

We are not interested in preserving the status quo; Musubi aims to bring talented people together to deliver whole of organisation value, brand campaigns that stir the heart, and to make a positive and enduring mark on the world. We help introduce an organisational culture that takes nimble approach to conceptualising challenges and creating new paradigms to solve competitive risks.

Over the past 20 years the core team at Musubi have been truly fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with a large number of great people, be they visionary CEOs, artists, architects, graphic designers, anthropologists, industrial designers, strategists and a number of inspired clients. We have honed the approach to whole of organisation branding to not to just fill in a single gap within an organisation but to find roadblocks, human centred opportunities, commercial value, and then identify the links that connect together to strengthen the whole. By improving the client’s economic systems to enhance brand expression we are also able to improve productivity.

What we have found is that there is a major schism between three paradigms. One is customer-based and focuses exclusively on the relationship customers have with the brand (from total indifference to attachment, loyalty, and willingness to buy and rebuy based on beliefs of superiority and evoked emotions). The second aims at producing measures in dollars. And the third is operational which measures staff KPIs void of the brand's strategic objectives. All approaches have their own champions. It is the goal of Musubi to unify these.

Many brands no longer know why they exist, what the spark was that propelled them into business. They struggle to define the purpose of the brand, define where the brand stems from, and where it draws its energy. It is critical for the brand to become the central organising principle of an organisation. It needs to be authentic and come from people that are going to live with it. To truly understand a brand, you have to peel back the past and study the origins; Study what make the organisation tick; Why do employees choose to work for you; What is the most important value you deliver to customers; What is the mission and purpose; and what is the unique magic that has help guide the business through tough times. It is only with new found clarity and why the business was created in the first place that we can bridge the purpose of the business with the target audience and build deeper brand relationships.

It is found that although the notion of organising around the brand is gaining acceptance and becoming a strategic aim for many companies, it remains uncommon in practice because it is so hard to implement without a clearly defined brand or a guiding framework. It requires leaders to take a holistic view of the brand and the organisation that transcends the marketing function and makes the brand a rallying cry for the whole organisation. More importantly, it requires the organisation to harmoniously align its people, processes, positioning and work environments in order to deliver the promise it makes to customers everyday (and thats where we help).

Brands are built by the sum of delights at each contact point and by their coherence. Building the right brand platform to activate that value the organisation carries doesn’t appear from nowhere, nor can it be arbitrarily assigned to the brand. Establishing the right brand language allows your brand to break free and express the business’s attributes.

Not knowing which language to speak, we merely conform to repeating the same groups of words or pictures over and over again, so that the whole brand message eventually becomes clogged. There is such a great urge to create unity, resemblance and a common spirit among the different campaigns that in the end they all seem merely to repeat one another. Each specific campaign message thus gets obliterated by an excessive concern to find the missing code! The code is always rather artificial whereas language is natural: it conveys the personality, culture and values of the sender, helping the latter either to announce products and services or to charm customers. Brand language finally serves as a means of decentralising decisions. Thanks to the use of a common glossary of terms, different subsidiaries worldwide can adapt the theme of their messages to local market and product requirements and yet preserve the brand’s overall unity and indivisible nature. Brand identity must reconcile freedom with coherence, a task which expression guides (also called brand charters) are meant to facilitate.

The corporate world is complex and it isn't getting any simpler. A major challenge in the fight against conformity is that for over 400 years the industrial revolution has worked hard to create systems of control. What we have are decisions and a mindset that is rooted in the past. But the world is changing. Companies think in compartments and it affects people in very disturbing ways. People amputate themselves from other people. Silo themselves and repress their intrinsic value. Thankfully, the power is shifting inch by inch into the hands of people. So how do we shape a complex organisation ready for a complex world? We wed people from within an organisation with people outside it.

Indeed the ideal collaborative relationship requires a different brand agency model, to be part of the executive team, participating in strategic, marketing, and HR team meetings as a way of gaining the best understanding of the goals as well as the potential, but also to bring to the team another aesthetic and conceptual point of view. One of the great aspects of the collaborative approach is that it can bring about a faster and nimble influence upon the internal culture, streamline processes and unearth genuine competitive value. We can have the greatest impact on better customer experience by ensuring that what we deliver is what is expected. This applies in all stages of the experience: information search, evaluation, purchase, delivery, use and so on. If the expectation is incorrect or misinformed, our marketing task is to reset it so that it better aligns with what we actually deliver.

Our goal is to create new sources of value in the world—that is wholistic and inclusive. Musubi is interested in how to develop a more collaborative approach. We work with organisations that seek to enter into a greater dialogue and two way interaction leading to a more integrated results. Creating a truly powerful brand requires the courage to challenges status quo and the discipline to develop the brand’s long term journey.

The brands that ultimately last are those that are able to surprise their current and future customers. This sums up the challenge facing businesses in a nutshell. Far from seeking to capitalise on its past – and thus to repeat itself – the brand should surprise, fulfil human needs, and promote change. But how can you know what will surprise the customers of tomorrow? Design with HEART.

About Musubi.

Musubi is a strategic brand agency and through a lens of Japanese design principles we create and design brands, workplace culture, workspaces and social environments.

We challenge established thinking and drive business and culture transformation. Seen through the lens of the inclusiveness, we identify, create, and implement a true point of differentiation.