‘Culture’ can be critical to your brand development

Did you know that ‘Culture’ can be critical to your brand development? Robin Tooms interviews Karen Love, director of practice growth for accounting firm PKF Texas.

Robin: Hello, and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, Vice President of Strategy at Savage, and I’m here today with Karen Love, Director of Practice Growth at PKF Texas. So, Karen, welcome to the show.

Karen: Thank you, I’m happy to be here. Thank you.

Robin: Well, wonderful. I want to know a little bit more about something I learned about PKF Texas, which is your culture. So, for your firm, culture is very important to the brand.

Karen: Yes, it is.

Robin: So I wanna hear from you some of the approach behind that and why you think it’s important to start with that culture.

Karen: I appreciate you asking that question, because we’ve always liked to take the inside-out approach, which means that the things that are happening internally would reflect on what our image and reputation is in the marketplace. We like to be involved in more than just number-crunching. We like to be involved in the corporate social responsibility efforts in our community. And so that outreach to different things in the marketplace is incredibly important – that we begin inside with our team members getting involved, giving input, being involved in the things we’re doing internally to help accommodate that.

Robin: It’s great that you start there, but something that’s internal is often invisible.

Karen: Right.

Robin: What are some of the ways that you make that real and visible?

Karen: When you stop and think about it, it’s interesting how it all comes together. It’s more like being an accounting firm. It’s the qualitative versus the quantitative stuff. And so we’ve done it a couple of different ways. One is our PKF University that we started back in the early 2000. It’s an award-winning program. But it was started in order to help do the CPE learning with the soft and hard skills, but it helped us to convey what one branch of the firm is doing to another branch, and it had that internal communications. And then we took those kinds of things to go outward with our united efforts, basically.

Robin: Okay, great, so taking that inside-out in a very real way.

Karen: Absolutely.

Robin: Well, thank you for sharing that very inside look with us.

Karen: Thank you.

Robin: Please join us next week for another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

Pannell Kerr Foster of Texas (PKF Texas) is a Houston-based CPA firm offering a full range of business consulting, technology, assurance, entrepreneurial advisory and tax solutions. Dedicated to middle market companies, the company is part of PKF International, which connects them to offices located in more than 480 major cities in 119 countries. https://www.pkftexas.com/

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Robin Tooms is a consultant for brand, marketing and communications strategies for B2B and service companies. Expertise includes corporate branding, investor communications, employee communications, social media, and marketing with emphasis on effective online marketing and use of technology.

Contact her at rtooms@savagebrands.com or reach her by phone at 713-522-1555.