know its culture.
Nevertheless, a company's public self-image -- however artificial -- is itself an expression of the corporate culture. The public image it expresses how the firm's leadership (key contributors to the culture, though hardly the only ones) want the organization to be seen; even the decision to hire a public-relations firm to manufacture an image says something of how the management views itself. In the case of Lands' End, the cultural messages sent by its self-assumed public image are so pervasive and idiosyncratic as to be a particularly unmistakable picture of the company leadership's self-perception, and therefore of a major ingredient of its corporate culture.
It is difficult to imagine that any PR firm could have invented the image that Lands' End projects of itself. Identifying itself with Garrison Keillor and "Prairie Home Companion," for example, is doubtless a shrewd marketing move, making a good fit to the firm's upscale, well-educated, stylistically conservative target market -- just the sort of people, one suspects, who are the core of Keillor's audience. But it is unlikely that an outside marketing consultant would have come up with the idea of show listings in the company webside.
In the case of Lands' End, moreover, the cultural messages sent by the firm's own promotional materials may be tested against outside events -- events of a sort the company would scarcely wish to publicize. In recent years Lands' End has suffered disappointing sales growth and earnings, a pileup of inventory, and a series of top-management shuffles, involving successive replacements of chief executives and, most recently, substantial management layoffs. None of this, of course, has been highlighted in the chatty magazine section of Lands' End's website. (Unless otherwise cited, all quotations below are from the website, www.landsend.com.) But, as will be seen below, the conclusions drawn about these events b...