brand strategy

This week, I’m continuing my series about lessons and takeaways from the crisis we are living through right now.

While the importance of workplace culture is well-understood, how to build a great culture is less established.  In the research and work I did leading to my upcoming book, FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies (published by Nicholas Brealey, an imprint of Hachette Book Group on March 13, 2018), I identified five common myths  about culture-building — as well as five strategies for cultivating a unique, healthy, sustainable organizational cultu

I picked up an old copy of Fast Company magazine yesterday. It is the 2012 March edition featuring the world’s top 50 most innovative companies. Apple was first, with Facebook, Google, and Amazon topping out the list. Now six years later—aside from a few new editions like Tesla, Airbnb, and Uber—there are no established companies stepping up to challenge the original four.

When will marketers learn that eyeballs aren’t worth more than integrity?!  Brand managers and advertising agencies continue to run irresponsible ads and do outrageous acts in an effort to draw attention to themselves.  At best they might get some short-lived PR but more likely they end up just wasting their money — and damaging their brand in the process.  It’s time to stop the stunt marketing.

The latest offenders come from the fast food restaurant chain realm:

Burger King’s Blunder

Now that marketers in practically every sector prioritize content marketing, storytelling is heralded as a brand’s most effective approach to developing content.  It makes sense — people are emotional beings, so we respond to stories because they engage us on an emotional level.  And, as Nicholas Ind and Oriol Iglesias write in Brand Desire, “Brands and storytelling come out of the same building blocks:  meaning and emotions.”  But take a closer look

By now, it should be obvious how important it is to clearly differentiate your brand. But I still get questions about how to identify key brand differentiators — or how to prioritize them, clarify them, or use them in brand strategy development.

So I’ve produced an excerpt from a recent webinar I gave in which I took participants through developing their strategic brand platforms.  Take a look to learn:

Here’s a hypothesis:  There are essentially nine different types of brands and you can jumpstart the development of your brand strategy by identifying the one that’s right for you.

Differentiation may quite possibly be the top priority in brand development. In today’s competitive business environment, simply being better than other brands no longer creates a sustainable advantage. Your brand must be different. As you scale-up your brand, it is critical to identify and develop your key brand differentiators.

So, it looks like Radio Shack filed for bankruptcy, which had been expected for some time now. It's a shame to see a company that's been around for so long close after almost 100 years, but they sadly brought it on themselves.

As I help companies define or re-define their brand strategies, we articulate the core values and attributes of their brands. We distill from all the things that could be said about their brands the most distinctive and defining elements.