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How did the successful brand-driven companies of the world – the Apples, the Disneys, the IBMs – get that way? Sure, they were ahead of the curve in recognizing the power of brands to define the company’s purpose, anchor corporate strategy and create an irresistible attraction for customers. But that’s just the beginning. A great brand strategy is basically a…

Peter Drucker apparently never said “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, but let’s not let truth get in the way of a great slogan. The truth, for purposes of this post, is that successful brand activation depends an awful lot on the metrics you employ to quantify it. To build your brand effectively into the fabric of…

Brand Connection is the process of building a profitable relationship between your brand and your customers and stakeholders. Call it the marketing stage of the Brand Activation process. Top consumer marketing companies already understand how this works. Look at any communication from Apple, BMW or Disney, from advertising to package design, and you can see the brand’s promise to the…

The key to unlocking brand potential lies in recognizing your brand not as a marketing initiative, but as a set of customer perceptions and expectations that arise from interactions with your company and products. This understanding revolutionizes the job of brand management. No longer just a marketing function, branding becomes the far-reaching task of aligning all corporate actions, processes and investments…

Once you’ve mapped out your fundamental brand concepts  in the first stage of the Brand Activation process (see Brand Exploration), it’s time to formalize the brand. The Brand Creation stage produces a coordinated set of words and visuals that help the brand project a single, consistent image to all that encounter it. The most visible products of Brand Creation comprise…

The first step in the brand activation journey is a strategic one. We call it Brand Exploration because it’s about searching out answers to the big strategic questions: What drives your company? What makes it remarkable? How will it change the world? What unique value does if offer to its customers? If these seem like obvious, basic questions… well, they…

Brand-driven companies are successful companies. The Disneys, BMWs and Red Bulls of the world use their brands, not just in marketing but throughout the organization, to bind strategy to execution, stay customer-focused and boost the effectiveness of everything they do. These companies often have either a long and storied brand history or a charismatic leader that imbue their corporate culture…