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Great, iconic brands achieve a mystical state of brand oneness – a universal clarity and consistency that drives their businesses to fantastic success. Think Apple, Disney, IBM, BMW. The rest of us? Instead of brand unity, we preside over what amounts to three different brands. For a business to operate at full power, these brands need to be aligned. It…

Today’s corporate brand is not your grandfather’s corporate brand. Our way of thinking about brands has undergone a sea-change in the last 20 years, but the words we use are the same. Could this be holding us back? The origin of the word “brand” is pretty easy to trace. Start with brand as a burning stick, then burning a brand…

Launching the next never-seen-before category buster? Brand differentiation is probably not a problem. More likely, you’re in an industry – business services? plumbing gaskets? – with dozens of competitors all offering pretty much the same thing. Setting yourself apart from the crowd is a huge challenge. But it’s the best sort of challenge, because it forces you to drill down…

Brand or culture: if we want to make our organizations stronger and more focused where should we allocate attention and resources? To put it another way, does culture drive brand, or is it the other way around? Or maybe brand and culture are just two different names for the same thing. “Brand Is Culture, Culture Is Brand” was the title…

Why is it that corporate leaders often feel ambushed by the most basic question anyone could ask about their business: What is your company’s purpose? For some the answer is so obvious that the question seems embarrassingly inappropriate. Ahem… we are here to make money. Well, sure. That’s not wrong, but the raw commercial answer barely scratches the surface. It’s…

In a recent post, we raised the alarming notion that it doesn’t matter very much to people whether or not brands are recognizably different from each other. Data on consumer behavior and attitudes suggest (falling somewhere short of proof) that people don’t differentiate much among brands, don’t hold stable brand perceptions, and ascribe similar attributes to all brands in a…