Don’t Try to Build a Great Brand Without This
In my experience working with some of the world’s greatest brands, I’ve discovered the single most important requirement for building a great brand: ownership of brand-building by executives at the highest level of the organization. More than big marketing budgets, more than breakthrough creative ideas, more than strong sales capability — if you want a great brand, your organization’s leaders must explicitly decide, articulate, and adopt your brand as the driver of every aspect of your business.
Brand-building can’t be delegated to the marketing department or ad agency. An organization’s leaders must drive and embrace it as an enterprise-wide approach. Brand-building must shift from a strategic, creative function to an orchestration, management function.
That’s why I was so pleased to the learn that Renaissance Executive Forums (REF) selected my book, What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles That Separate the Best from the Rest (Jossey-Bass), to use as curriculum for its Strategies for Success program. REF brings together Chief Executives into an advisory board process so they can gain fresh ideas and new insights on how to get themselves and their organizations from where they are now to where they want to be. Every year REF takes its members through an intensive two-day program, Strategies for Success. This year, the professional day covered What Great Brands Do, with content, exercises, and discussions adapted from my book. (This year’s personal day covered Sally Hogshead‘s How to Fascinate — I was thrilled to be in such terrific company!)
The following is the kick-off to a series of videos that were used throughout the program, including interviews with REF members from great brands including Stone Brewing Co. explaining how they implement the principles from my book and the results they’ve achieved. In this intro video, REF CEO Jim Canfield and I talk about how I qualified the great brands in my book and I give a brief description of each of the brand-building principles. It provides a good introduction to What Great Brands Do if you haven’t read it, and serves as a brief refresher if you have. Hope you enjoy!
Get your copy of the sample chapter from What Great Brands Do here.
related:
- “what great brands do” infographic
- great brands do brand as business
- Brand-Building: Management Imperative, Not Marketing Initiative