the power of stating what your company isn't

It can be useful to define your company by what it is not . Financial cooperatives, for example, were able to communicate their trustworthiness during the financial crisis with their “we are not a bank” message. During a qualitative, longitudinal study of a German company, author Madeleine Rauch and her colleagues looked at how the founders’ determination not to be a “corporation” helped to define the firm. It allowed employees to hold onto their sense of identity in the course of numerous strategic pivots.