Your Brand Has an Identity. Why Don't Your People?

In 2013, researchers in Norway recruited a group of cyclists to take part in a set of competitive time trials. First, they raced individually, then they raced in teams. As expected, the group times were slower than the sum of individual times. When a person’s effort gets lost in the group, they just don’t push themselves quite as hard. Psychologists call this phenomenon "social loafing."

 

Then the researchers tried something different. Before the next team time trial, half the participants spent 30 minutes creating things like a team name and slogan - they even made t-shirts for their group. When this team raced again, they didn’t just match their individual times, they actually beat them. Social loafing had become social labouring.

 

What happened? The group had created an identity, and that identity lifted its performance.

 

 

When people adopt an identity

When people see themselves as part of a team, two things happen.

 

First, the group’s identity shapes individual behaviour. It provides expectations to live up to. Team members start thinking "people like us do things like this." The team identity becomes a shortcut for how to act, even in situations nobody has defined.

 

You might recognize this in your own life. One part of my identity is being Liverpudlian. When I think of myself as a Scouser, it informs my actions - perhaps giving me a readiness to speak up or share an opinion! We all carry multiple identities like this: Liverpudlian in one moment, father in another, strategist in the next. Different contexts bring to the fore different identities.

 

Second, team identity gives individuals skin in the game. When the group’s status rises, individual self-esteem rises with it. Social identity theorists Henri Tajfel and John Turner, whose 1970s research established this field, showed that strong identification eliminates social loafing because "my success" and "the team’s success" become inseparable.

 

 

Not every group identity works

Is the secret of high-performance teams 30 minutes of brainstorming group names? Put simply: no.

 

Some identities are adopted but lack what’s needed to shape behaviour and drive collective success. Others, more fundamentally, don’t get internalised in the first place.

 

Research by Dr. Vivian Vignoles at the University of Sussex shows teams with the strongest identity outperform those with the weakest by 53%. Behind that gap, researchers identified six characteristics that determine effectiveness, three of which are most relevant for brand teams.

 

 

Meaning: What matters and what doesn’t

A team identity is powerful when it articulates what the group stands for – making clear what matters and what doesn’t, and giving members shared expectations to live up to. An effective group identity is values-based, embedded in how the group sees itself, not displayed as abstract principles.

 

If identity is based on hitting numbers or achieving goals, it’s less likely to be adopted and won’t guide behaviour beyond the scoreboard. But if it’s built on values or principles, something that remains true regardless of performance, the identity endures. Performance improvement becomes a byproduct of meaningful identity, not the identity itself.

 

The Ritz-Carlton built its entire identity on a single principle: "We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen." This motto, created by founder Horst Schulze at age 16, defines employees not by their job function but by their character, shaping how they see themselves and, naturally, how they serve.

 

 

Continuity: Connecting past, present, and future

Continuity is the temporal dimension of identity. An effective group identity gives its members a sense that they’re part of a narrative that started before them and continues after them.

 

Performance coach Owen Eastwood, who has worked with England Football, the South African cricket team, and NATO’s Command Group, calls this "whakapapa," a Māori concept meaning "unbroken chain." Each group member is part of an unbroken chain of people who share the same identity, receiving it from those before and passing it to those after, adding their own mark to it along the way.

 

Continuity positions each team member as a custodian. In the business world, new hires aren’t just joining a company, they’re joining a story. One that predates them, one they’ll add their own chapter to before handing it on to the next generation. That sense of stewardship, of being part of something lasting, makes the identity more likely to be adopted and more powerful.

 

 

Distinctiveness: Clear boundaries between us and them

Finally, a group identity works when it’s distinctive: unique and different from others in recognisable ways. For it to be "us," it can’t be like "them."

 

Distinctiveness isn’t just about being different, it’s about standing out in ways people can see and signal. Like the cyclists with their team t-shirts, teams need signs and symbols that make the identity visible. Names matter here: turning "employees" into, for example, "Googlers" creates a badge that shows belonging, both to insiders and outsiders.

 

 

Brand identity, team identity

Companies typically look to the People team to build cultures that drive performance, often working with Internal Comms to activate their strategy and bring it to life. But all of this is downstream of identity, and identity creation sits naturally in the Brand team’s toolkit.

 

The opportunity is to ensure that brand strategy and identity work can be applied to employees from the start. The meaning, continuity, and distinctiveness you’re already creating for your customers can, with the right framing, work just as powerfully for your people.

 

This doesn’t require separate work. It requires a broader view on the work you’re already doing.

 

 

What that means in practice

Your brand truths – the founding story, cultural roots, pivotal decisions that shaped the present – create continuity when framed as narrative, not timeline. When onboarding explains "what story you’re joining" rather than "where we’ve come from," new hires are elevated from employees to custodians.

 

Your brand strategy should frame what the brand stands for so it translates naturally into what the team stands for. Express it with emphasis on values and principles, not outcomes and metrics. If it’s hard to infer from the positioning what it means for employee behaviour, it won’t work as team identity.

 

Your distinctive assets shouldn’t just serve in-market activation – apply these same assets as symbols of internal belonging. When visual and verbal systems move from marketing materials into everyday language – the badges, rituals, artefacts employees use with each other – they signal group membership, not just brand identity. A collective noun for employees matters as much as your tagline.

 

The work is the same. The deliverable encompasses more.

 

 

The difference it makes

Teams with a strong identity show measurably different behaviours: they share information more freely because others’ success is their success. They maintain higher standards because the team’s reputation directly affects their personal status: when identity is internalised, protecting the group’s standing protects their own. They persist longer on difficult problems because the group’s reputation is their reputation. They need less supervision because they self-correct against shared expectations. Training costs drop because identity provides more powerful guidance than any manual. Crucially, a strong identity also becomes another reason for talent to consider a firm.

 

This isn’t just a brand opportunity; it’s a collaboration opportunity. People teams have systems and processes to embed culture. Brand teams have the toolkit to create identity. When brand teams develop meaning, continuity, and distinctiveness that works for both customers and employees, they give People teams something powerful to work with.

 

Applying this thinking doesn’t require Brand teams to learn new skills. It’s completing the work they already started – and giving People teams the identity foundations their systems need to build on.

 

The next time you develop a brand strategy, add one consideration: "Will employees want to make this identity their own?" If the answer isn’t immediately clear, the strategy isn’t finished.

 

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Matt Boffey is Chief Strategy Officer at Design Bridge and Partners,

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and michaeljung