denise lee yohn: brand as business bites™ / brand delivery

In a post earlier this week, I started to address why some companies don’t operationalize their brands.  I suggested that there are 3 kinds of business leaders who fail to leverage the full potential of their brands. (more…)

Over coffee the other day a colleague asked me a question I actually get asked a lot:  Do you find that people “get it?”  By “it” he was referring to operationalizing the brand, the approach I teach and help my clients implement.  He asked because he’s found, as have I, that although many company leaders claim to understand the difference between expressing and operationalizing a brand, the fact is, most don’t put their brand in the driver’s seat of their organization.

Our talk prompted me to think about why this is the case.  Most business leaders are eager to leverage the full potential of their brands, but they’re not following through.  (more…)

Those of you who are Star Trek fans would have felt right at home with me the other day.   I went to check out the new Microsoft store which just opened at Fashion Valley mall here in San Diego because I wanted to do a compare/contrast to the Apple store in the same mall.   My fellow fans would have felt at home in the Microsoft store not because it was a cool look at the future of culture and technology, but rather because it seemed to be the Mirror Universe. (more…)

Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum 2010:  Creating Breakthrough Customer Experiences featured a fantastic line-up of speakers — including company leaders from client organizations as diverse as H&R Block, FedEx, and Sprint, as well as thought leaders from Forrester and other service providers.

From all of the presentations, it was clear that “creating breakthrough customer  experiences” (defined on Wikipedia as “the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier“) requires systematic, cultural, and organizational changes within a company. (more…)

Now that summer is officially here, I wanted to take a look back at the past 6 months and see what kinds of conversations had been sparked by brand as business bites. The following are the top posts from each month in terms of number of re-tweets, comments, or emails they generated – I’ve also included some of the commentary.  I’d definitely like to hear more, so please take a look and then add your voice to the conversation by clicking on the “comments” link below. (more…)

I’m working on two big and juicy brand repositioning projects.  While both involve quite significant departures from the companies’ current strategies and it’s still pretty early on in the projects, it’s likely one is going to be successful and the other, not, or at least less so. I thought the reason for the difference between the two would make for a good post.

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A couple of months ago I gave a workshop on my topic “Brand as Business:  How Companies Drive Business Growth by Operationalizing Their Brands.”  Feedback was so positive I thought I’d get a brief video of excerpts made to share with my readers here.    Please check it out and let me know what you think (run time:  approx. 8 minutes).

denise lee yohn brand as business workshop from Denise Yohn on Vimeo.

Earlier this week I posted some key takeaways from the keynote speakers and panelists at the Southern California Business Growth Conference.  As a panelist on the marketing track, one of the things I said during the “Brand Implementation & Impact: Bring your Brand to Market” session seemed to spark some interest of its own – and so I thought I’d say more about it here.

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I usually try to keep my critiques to categories I’ve worked in, primarily because I think it’s irresponsible for me to comment on what works and what doesn’t when I have little basis for my assessment other than being a consumer.  So I initially demurred when some folks have asked for my POV on AT&T’s new campaign, Rethink Possible.

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Jay Ehret (aka @themarketingguy) of The Marketing Spot was kind enough to invite me to participate in his latest Marketing Roundtable.

I enjoyed the chat with Jay as well as Bill Schley of David ID and Harry Hoover of My Creative Team.  Our talk covered issues from the social media bubble to listening to customers to operationalizing the brand (guess who brought up that topic?!)

Please check out the podcast and record your own thoughts/reactions by calling the audio comment line: 254-433-8529.  And while you’re at it, check out Jay’s other recent roundtables and interviews including a talk with Marty Neumeier (author of The Brand Gap) and Steve McKee (author of When Growth Stalls.)