You Can’t Out-Market a Broken Culture

When I first entered the world of marketing, I worked in TV advertising. Clients came to us looking for leads—and we delivered. We could get them views. We could get them clicks. We could even get people through their doors. But not all of them saw success.

Why?
Because some of these businesses couldn’t convert the leads once they got them.
And that had nothing to do with marketing.

It had everything to do with their internal culture.

Culture Isn’t a Pizza Party or a Perk Sheet

Let’s be clear: culture isn’t about company potlucks or “employee engagement”. It’s not a list of values printed on a poster or an onboarding video that mentions the company mission once.

Culture is everything. A living, breathing, evolving organism.
It’s operational. It’s relational. It’s systemic.

It’s how you treat people.
It’s how decisions are made.
It’s how your leaders communicate, respond, support, and lead.

Most companies really don’t get this. They perform culture at the surface level, but they don’t operationalize it at the root. They invest in external branding—new logos, reworked mission statements, refreshed color schemes, and time spent on LinkedIN posts—meanwhile their internal brand sits forgotten in what I like to call…

The Junk Drawer of Culture

You know that drawer everyone has? The one filled with dried out pens, half dead batteries, old receipts, keys you don’t remember what they go to? That’s where most organizations toss their internal culture collateral.

Mission? In the drawer.
Vision? Drawer.
Core Values? Yeah, you onboarded with them and displayed them proud during recruitment—then employees never heard them again. (And by heard I really mean felt and believed.)

And when leadership isn’t reinforcing the message, when the vision isn’t echoed across departments and up and down the hierarchy, everything becomes a game of broken telephone. The top says one thing. The front line hears something else.

And the customer?

They get the watered-down version of a brand that’s lost its shape.

Loyalty? Goes right out-the-door.

Brand Dilution Begins on the Inside

Your marketing team might craft a brilliant campaign—maybe it even goes viral. But if your people aren’t aligned, it won’t land.

Your frontline employees—those interacting directly with your customers—are the end point of your brand funnel. If they’re confused, misinformed, or checked out, your message gets diluted before it ever reaches the market.

It’s not just customer-facing roles either. Your developers, service reps, fulfillment teams—they all shape the customer experience in invisible ways.

So if the inside isn’t aligned, the outside can’t shine.

Marketing Principles Belong Inside, Too

In marketing, we know repetition matters. We build campaigns around consistency—one message, delivered across multiple touchpoints, over time.

Now imagine applying that same discipline internally.

Imagine treating your people as your first audience.
Imagine building organic, internal messaging systems that reinforce your mission, not once, but constantly.

Not through gimmicks. Not through email blasts or breakroom posters.
But through people. Through leaders at every level. Through real conversations, consistent behaviors, and intentional communication.

Because the most powerful internal marketing strategy is the same one that’s ruled the external marketing world forever:

Word of Mouth.

Culture Grows Through Conversation, Not Campaigns

This is why influencer marketing has taken off in the past decade. People trust people.
And inside your company, it’s the same.

When leadership lives the message—when teams echo it, support each other, and believe it—your culture becomes contagious. It grows not by force, but by presence.

That’s the kind of culture that drives performance. That keeps people. That attracts talent. That shortens the sales cycle because your external marketing is no longer covering cracks—it’s amplifying alignment.

You Don’t Need a Rebrand. You Need a Realignment.

Companies love the quick fix: redesigns, ad spend, a new campaign.
But those are surface-level solutions.

If you want marketing to work, go deeper. Start inside.
Because when your internal brand is strong, your external one sells itself.

Retention gets easier. Lead generation improves. Revenue grows—not just from tactics, but from trust.

Want to See Where You Stand?

I created a free tool to help companies do exactly that.
The Trust Test is a quick, no-pressure download that helps you audit alignment, identify internal friction points, and see if your brand is suffering from internal confusion.

It’s not a fix-all. But a place to start.
Because culture isn’t something you decorate a company with.
It’s something you build and nurture—or something that breaks everything else.