What Great Brands Do summary

Many people think that the only function of a brand is advertising and marketing. In fact, a brand is just as important for the people inside a company: if you align your corporate culture with your brand’s values, this can help employees better work together toward a common goal.

This alignment also amplifies the power of a brand toward the customer. Imagine your brand is a source of light that shines on your prospective customers. Now imagine your business and its stakeholders like suppliers, and sales representatives are those who connect the brand and the customer. If these people aren’t properly aligned with the brand’s values, they will block or distort the light coming from the brand, decreasing its efficacy.

At first glance, a slogan like “Just Do It” seems ineffective – it doesn’t even mention the company’s name, Nike, nor the products the brand represents. So how on earth did this phrase become one of the best-known brand slogans of all time?

Successful branding is about emotions, not products. It’s about creating an emotional connection between the brand and the customer. As Scott Bedbury, Nike’s one-time marketing chief, wrote, "‘Just Do It’ was not about sneakers, it was about values. It was not about products, it was about brand ethos.”

Some people think that a key part of building a great brand is being trendy, meaning following current trends.

But in fact, following trends can be a risky endeavor, because trends change quickly, and trying to adapt your brand to each change can compromise its integrity.

Just as blindly following the latest trends can be dangerous for your brand, so can chasing customers indiscriminately. Sure, it might increase profits in the short term, but trying to appeal to everyone risks compromising your brand’s integrity.

Great brands don’t chase after every customer but rather focus their energy on core customers.

Besides being a slave to the latest trends and chasing after customers indiscriminately, there’s a third mistake that brands can make: focusing too intently on growth.

To meet shareholder demands, most CEOs are under constant pressure to introduce new products, diversify services and expand the business. But pushing for growth at the expense of brand integrity can often result in the demise of even a great brand.

One of the challenges of building a great brand lies in getting your entire company to present a united front to the customer. Big companies may have several departments that deal with customers, and yet the brand must be fully and uniformly integrated into all of them.

To achieve this, you need to do two things:

So far we’ve talked a lot about how building a strong brand is good for a company. But actually it can also be good for the world: “doing good” is a key factor in branding.

In 2012, an influential article by branding experts John Gerzema and David Roth proclaimed that as a society, we’re now entering a new era where corporate reputation and brand are becoming the same thing.

In an earlier blink, we mentioned that a strong brand can function as a guiding compass for your entire organization, influencing everyday decisions. For this to happen, you need to operationalize your brand strategy, and this requires implementing two brand-building core competences across your entire company.

First, you should distribute information regarding your brand and brand strategy to everyone in your organization, and make sure every employee keeps themselves updated on brand information. Make it clear that your brand is your business, not just some little facet of it.

The key message in this book:

A brand is more than a mere marketing tool – it’s a guiding compass for a company’s organization and strategy. Strong brands can attract lots of customers, but companies have to be careful to uphold their brand’s integrity and not just chase after trends, growth or every customer segment.