Denise Lee Yohn

Wendy’s celebrates its heritage through a unique customer experience at this, the site of the original Wendy’s restaurant. Check out a video audit and analysis of the brand experience.

“Who should own the brand?” Mitch Joel, digital marketing guru and founder of the agency Twist Image, recently posed this question to me during an interview on his podcast about my book What Great Brands Do (take a listen to the podcast here — it’s one of my favorite interviews). 

From What Great Brands Do: By connecting internal culture to broader cultural movements, great brands create futures in which they thrive and grow.

Brand Experience Week wrapped up last week, but there are plenty of Brand Experience Briefs for you to learn from. Check out these 41 videos that audit and analyze new or interesting restaurant and retail brands to learn the do’s and don’ts of customer experience design:

My colleagues over at Bulldog Drummond have assembled an informative, inspiring collection of pieces entitled, “Be the Brand.” All are related to the central tenet that, “Brand is not a logo or a tagline. It’s a multidimensional platform that can be your greatest differentiator and competitive edge.”

There was a lot to celebrate at Southwest Airlines’ annual shareholders’ meeting last week. The company was riding high after reporting net income in Q1 2014 doubled to $152 million and passenger revenue per available seat mile, a key performance metric for the airline industry, rose 3.5%.

Today’s retail headlines are troubling.

Office Depot just announced it will close 400 stores. Radio Shack wants to close 1,100 stores but its lenders are resisting. Sears is looking to sell off chunks of its real estate.

The other day I was meeting with the executive team of a growing retail chain, a prospective client. The conversation turned to the brand tagline and as the Chief Executive Officer began to explain how the tagline came to be, it became clear that no on around the table had ever heard the explanation before.

When Dietrich Mateschitz launched Red Bull in 1987, he wanted the brand to be perceived as an ultra-premium drink so he made it the most expensive carbonated drink around at $2 a can.

“Brazen.” “Provocative.” “Exuberant.” What automotive brand comes to mind when you hear those words? BMW? Audi? Maybe even Porsche?