Reading Time: 6 minutesIf you’re responsible for growing a brand, what are you trying to achieve? What does success look like? Some measure awareness. Others look at penetration. Or campaign results. But here are the five success criteria for brands that we look to use to judge progress over time and for proving brand effectiveness. Our five success […]
Tag: Brand models
Motivation: Step 4 in activating a purposeful culture
Reading Time: 6 minutesThere’s a temptation to believe that the sheer logic of a good decision will sway the crowd; that if you make a good case and present it in an inspiring way, you’ve done everything you need to for that idea to gain instant uptake in an organisational culture. We’ve yet to see that happen successfully. […]
Exploration: Step 3 in building purposeful culture
Reading Time: 6 minutesHaving clearly outlined why change is needed and the opportunity that change could generate, too many culture change programmes then leave people to make the changes themselves without very much more explanation. This is the right time for exploration: for people to talk things through, in terms of the broad and personal implications of building […]
Inspiration. Step 2 in activating purposeful culture change
Reading Time: 6 minutesAn amazing thing happens when you ask people to imagine their current workplace working to its potential. First, they smile. Then they hesitate. Then they want to talk about everything that’s wrong and why a better workplace is not real or practical or feasible. Purposeful culture change takes time. If you’re patient though and you […]
Agitation: Step 1 in building a purposeful culture
Reading Time: 6 minutesWhen we ask people about whether they want to change the brand culture, there is ambivalence. In a distressed culture, everyone can see that something is wrong. But the thought of change is not necessarily comforting. To make the commitment to building a more purposeful culture, it’s critical to point to a cultural agitation point: […]
8 things your brand strategy framework should address
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe goal of a robust brand strategy framework is to bridge now and an agreed point or points in the future. Without this reference it is too easy to get distracted and sidetracked. Without a clear brand strategy, there is also no roadmap for cultural alignment, for long-term storytelling, for investment and for divestment. Your […]
Why linking strategy, culture and stories matters
Reading Time: 5 minutesIt’s tempting to ignore linking strategy, culture and stories. After all they seem like different things, and address different aspects of bringing a brand to life. At first glance, strategy focuses on where the business needs to get to. Culture talks to how you bring out the best in people. Stories are how audiences receive […]
Forget supply and demand. Think supply and desire.
Reading Time: 3 minutesAccording to mainstream marketing theory, price is decided by supply and demand and fluctuates accordingly. In today’s market however, pricing is increasingly about supply and desire. The rules of volatility have changed. The upgrade culture, shorter product lifetimes and highly efficient distribution chains have flattened the gaps between supply and demand in so many sectors, […]
Rethinking brand growth
Reading Time: 3 minutesOne of my favourite questions when a brand leader tells me how much they intend to grow over the next 12 months is to ask them how much they think the market itself will grow. In other words, how much organic growth can they expect the market to give them just for participating versus how […]
Why brand management will replace marketing
Reading Time: 3 minutesP&G’s decision to formally end the era of “marketing” at the company and make the shift to brand management may accelerate what amounts to much more than a title change for marketers generally. To me, it could point to a fundamental re-examination of the role of the people responsible for brands.
Brands are not as easy as they look
Reading Time: 5 minutesA lot of people talk a lot about brands as impressions: brands are how you are talked about when you are not in the room; your brand is the sum of the prompted and unprompted associations that people have of you; your brand is expressed in the ways that you are remembered. All of these […]
So many different types of brand
Reading Time: 7 minutesWe often talk about “brand” as if it is one thing. It’s not of course – in fact, the meaning and the use of the term differs, quite markedly, depending on the context. By my reckoning, brand is categorised in more than 20 different ways. (So much for the single minded proposition!)