“Intangible assets are the the reason marketers get out of bed in the morning”.

According to Olding, assets that make up brands, reputation and customer value are only slowly coming to the attention of other senior executives particularly in Australia.

Quantifying brand performance has senior marketers and finance executives fighting to grasp each other’s language and context.

“Quite simply, successful brands require effective marketing and financial management”

Major contributing factors to the communication gap are:

• A culture of departmental silos
• mistrust in the marketer’s measurement skills
• underestimation of the importance of brand from the senior management
• limited and fragmented relationships between departments

Olding goes on to cite two Australian business case studies illustrating her point that only a joint collaboration and coordination between Marketing and Finance achieves deeper brand equity.

She goes on to quote Prof. Don Schultz, who is summarizing the standard of Australian brand management as too little up-front investment in resource allocation and too much time spent on measuring past performance.

This is a very poignant article which is very appropriate to all firm sizes and industries across Australia. How often does your CFO/Accountant partner with the Managing Director, and the CMO/Marketing Manager/Coordinator in your business to discuss the next year in a brand panel?

Much has been written about the influence of national culture and cross-cultural influence on globalized companies (see for example key culture writers like Hofstede, Tropenaars and Friedman). The link of one’s heritage and underlying assumptions to organsiational performance per se has held bread and butter money for generations of business consultants, HR professionals and psychologists.

It strikes me as interesting, that a quantitative measurement is often engaged to ‘measure’ the organisational culture, e.g. “…33% of our people are effective in their performance; 43% engage in after-hours social activities…”, as if behavioural observation was all that culture is; e.g. we hear culture defined as ‘the way we do things around here‘.

This may be a catchy way of remembering this ‘culture thing’, but it is not an organisational culture definition. Culture is deeper ingrained in people than behaviour that we observe everyday. We behave based on our beliefs and values which are fundamentally based on our deeper assumptions.

That’s why culture can be shared, even when the key people, who left the place, are not there anymore to demonstrate the behaviour. I call this the living heritage of organisations. To measure this, we need different instruments, don’t you think?