Brand Strategy Insights By Actual Humans For Those Interested In Improving Performance & Increasing Returns. So Yeah, Pretty Much Everybody.

We live in a dangerously divided world where politics, branding, and capitalism collide. Fueled by social media’s immediacy, vast reach, and influence, and a society stoked by activism, we’ve never been more socially conscious, engaged, and divided. People are angry at their perception of injustice in the world and with each other. Whether brands should stay silent or speak up

In 1988, the late great Dan Wieden had just started Wieden & Kennedy. Their first client, Nike, needed a tagline. In an interview with Design Indab, Wieden revealed the final tagline was inspired by the last words of a death row inmate Gary Gilmore who said, “You know, let’s do it.” Weiden recalled, “I remember when I read that, I was like, that’s amazing. I mean, how, in the face

For Leadership looking to energize their company, accelerate market performance, and grow equity value and returns, we have your secret weapon. In one sense, it’s always been there. But with increased understanding of the financial return of strong brands and their intangibles, this weapon has never been more powerful. Brand audits have been around for a long time. However, they’ve traditionally

For private equity and venture capital, how value creation happens has finally grown up. Once limited to financial engineering and operational improvements to increase value and investment outcomes, building brand equity is now the critical third leg of the value creation stool. Finally, the industry woke up to the significant power of intangible brand equity and creativity to accelerate market performance, increase equity value, and reduce risk—all drivers of investment success.

Long before digital marketing started to suffocate emotional creativity in favor of unnecessarily complex, performance-based blindness, my agency presented a TV spot for a high-end audio brand. We were excited. We had a powerful concept, and we recognized its potential to drive sales and build long-term brand equity. We presented the animatics and passed out the production budgets. It was a stroke of luck to get an

Companies with strong internal brand cultures enjoy better market performance and higher customer loyalty and advocacy. They enjoy substantially higher employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention. And for PE/VC, strong brand cultures drive higher enterprise and equity value, improving multiples and investment outcomes.

It is overdue. Leveraging the power of brand and its intangibles is the new best practice for maximizing value creation and firms looking to outperform the completion are embracing the power of building strong brands. When leveraged in concert, these three best practices for value

PE/VC firms have a simple goal: create added value. Acquire a strong target with growth potential, increase its value, and sell generating profitable returns for stakeholders. The challenge appears simple; generate value by improving business performance. Yet inexplicably, the single most significant contributor to enterprise value has largely been ignored.

Just as a strong brand significantly impacts consumers, buyers are equally influenced. Both consumers and buyers of businesses will always be making both a rational and emotional decision. The final decision is always emotional and the brand is a significant driver of the decision. For an acquirer, a strong brand indicates low risk and a high likelihood of future

Your perspective on the role of a chief brand officer directly relates to your world view of brand and your philosophy for building a sustainable and valuable company. This perspective finds clarity by answering questions like, what is a brand? How do you build brand equity? What is the importance of brand positioning? How do people fall in love with, and become loyal to brands?

The primary directive for your management or operating team now is to position and prepare your business to benefit from the disruption and ride the recovery. The actions you take now may well make or break your company on the other side of the curve. Beyond the hope that mankind finds its humanity once again, opportunity is there for businesses that prepare and adjust early.

The truth is, brand is the most misperceived, and erroneously used word in business. It means a lot of different things to different people. Some exhibit a disturbingly narrow understanding of brand and its power to impact business performance and value. Their definition of brand is off. This misconception of brand, and the narrow scope in which it is often considered, is deeply ingrained.

If branding is not part of your company’s value creation strategy, you’re leaving money behind. Brand and its equity is one of the most valuable assets that a company has and the driver for financial success. When looking to exit, companies can command larger transaction multiples based solely on the brand and the strength of

While the power of strategic branding to help companies increase financial returns, both operationally and in M&A transactions is intellectually understood and acknowledged, it is, inexplicably, a frustratingly difficult sale. Forget the unfortunate reality that many people limit their understanding of “brand” to visual identity, the challenge is that the inherent power

Let’s start with this: your brand is not your logo or your color palette. It’s the perceptions and feelings people have about you, it’s what people say about you to others. Your brand is a relationship first, not a font. To earn that relationship, brands must have meaning, purpose, and saliency. Relationships are what drives behavior, not logos.

In Q4 of 2017, Apple dominated the smart phone market driving 51% of the category’s revenues on just 19.3% of total units sold. The next largest share of revenue was Samsung at 15.7% on 18.6% of total units shipped. The moral of this little financial comparison? Apple can

For CMO’s today, options for building your brand are changing before your eyes. These days, leading brands are thinking like publishers, creating editorial calendars, hiring chief content officers and curating their asses off. This is all good and well, but curated content simply won’t

Sometimes I just can’t understand what the hell is wrong with people, and this incident at Starbucks is a particularly disturbing example. Sadly, it’s testimony to how far humanity has yet to go to shed prejudices and biases that stifle us from being a unified planet. Last week, a Starbucks manager in Philadelphia called 911 because

This has been bothering me and it’s been building for a while. Yes, things are ugly out there. The country is struggling with social issues of pretty significant proportions. For brands it’s a tricky time. The people have unprecedented power. Brands know a viral tweet, a hashtag campaign or a Facebook group can get the

Brands are living, breathing things. They require shaping, nurturing, and maintenance over time. Done well, a strong brand has the power to build a business and sustain it well into the future, and can make its owner rich along the way. Brand equity, vs. brand value, has significant power beyond the balance sheet. Brand value is the

Of all the cognitive biases that affect business, confirmation bias might be the most insidious. It’s a challenge for many businesses that can negatively impacts performance. Smart C-Suites know this bias well. Confirmation bias is the human tendency to search for, favor, and use information that confirms one’s pre-existing views. Confirmation bias eliminates challenge and free thinking becoming

Our psychological relationships with brands and the resulting brand equity is one of those amorphous concepts that’s always been hard to quantify. Nevertheless, successful investors know the benefits of a strong brand are undeniably real. A brand is a company’s most enduring asset. Properly nurtured and leveraged it has tremendous financial value.