Keys to build your startup's culture (2/2)

Following with the topic covered in the previous entry, we can analyze some modern marketing theories to better understand the positive effect of prioritization among criteria that we might consider equally positive. In such theories there are three axes which are usually analyzed as the key aspects to pay attention to in our marketing strategy: operational and process excellence, product/service performance superiority and the proximity (usually described as "intimacy") to our customers. Reaching the maximum in all of these axes seems highly desirable, but our organization's strategy, considering our need for differentiation and leadership, must focus on selecting the axis in which we want to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and to be recognized as "excellent".

This idea on having a "symbol of identity", without giving up on other values or positive abilities but with a clear focus on one above the rest, has the same beneficial effect in our interaction with the market we are targeting as inside our organization. In the end, it all comes down to our organization being recognized by a key idea, around which we can unite our team, so that the market perceives such value as indissolubly tied to our brand or product.

In fact, we could extend this idea to find another key point that I see as fundamental given that, when building a startup's culture, we must understand it as a continuum that applies both inside and outside the organization. It is utterly useless to build a scale of values for our work inside the organization if it dilutes itself as soon as we face our first contact with customers. Or vice versa, it is not sustainable at all to build a clear strategy when we focus our customers if we don't apply the very same principles wit our "internal customers". One way or the other, those incoherencies in our startup's culture will in time turn into "cracks" that eventually will break our organization.

Coherence and consistency when applying our principles and prioritization of the principle that we consider our "symbol of identity", without discontinuities between the inside of our organization and the market we interact with, are the keys which will ensure us a solid organizational culture, an easier alignment of the visions of all our team members and a differential recognition in the market's eyes as being excellent in what we focus on.

[Haz clic aquí para la versión en español de esta entrada]