Salter>Mitchell | Change

culture change

Want to change a culture? Change how people act.

Culture change is not a pitch but a process. We don’t offer campaigns pleading for people to have a change of heart. We offer them a reason to change. We don’t try to change their values. We begin by offering something they value. It’s called social marketing: Developing a more enticing reason to change how someone acts by reworking a process, reframing an idea or creating a new offer altogether.

To transform a culture, we apply marketing research and techniques like segmentation, sampling, permission marketing, branding, and improving the “customer” experience in such non-traditional settings as government agencies, schools, colleges and dispute resolution processes.

Put simply, we change a few target behaviors. New behaviors, once observed, create norms – that is, expectations about how to act. And those expectations essentially define the culture of a community, company or any other group.

We work with our partner Proteus International in corporate environments to translate ambitious vision statements into real change in the day-to-day output of employees. In the nonprofit sector, we work with advocacy organizations to make promises of cooperation blossom into regularly used systems of collaboration. We can also help a national organization build a new culture of cooperation, as we have done by helping the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency work with partners to create the Source Water Collaborative.

Whatever the setting, we believe culture change should bubble up quietly. Real change is not launched in a company-wide memo or web cast. Goals can be set very publicly, but change is not declared; it is celebrated when it happens. That, of course, is our bottom line: How people change what they do and inevitably spur a culture change in the process.