The Brand Gap summary

Believe it or not, the Coca-Cola brand is worth $70 billion – a figure that represents 60 percent of the company’s total value!

And Coca-Cola isn’t alone. Today, the measure of any company’s value lies in the strength of its brand.

So how do you go about building a strong brand? Start by closing the brand gap, or the gap between strategy and creativity.

Here’s how the brand gap works in many companies. Left-brained strategy people work together, perhaps in the marketing department. These employees tend to be analytical, verbal and logical.

Meanwhile, the design department is exclusively populated by right-brained creatives. These employees are more intuitive, with strong spatial and visual skills.

And whenever tension happens between these two polarized groups, you end up with a brand gap.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this in your own workplace. Have you ever developed a highly sophisticated strategy that, upon execution, just doesn’t connect with customers? That’s likely due to the brand gap.

Ultimately, this phenomenon poses a major problem, because without a unified brand, your company simply won’t be able to compete in the marketplace.

Look at it this way: Companies with a brand gap can’t communicate who they are, so they don’t build a strong relationship to customers. And since customers don’t know what to expect, they won’t consistently buy the company’s products.

But in the case of charismatic brands, there’s little so-called psychic distance between customers and companies. In other words, customers have a solid relationship with a company and know what to expect from its products.

For example, companies like Coca-Cola, Apple and Nike have achieved this by establishing brands that communicate ideas of joy, beauty and style – all things people want for themselves. The goal of any brand is to develop this kind of aspirational, appealing identity and to communicate it consistently.

Each and every charismatic brand today has mastered the five disciplines of branding, which you’ll learn about in the upcoming blinks.