Reading Time: 10 minutes A deliberate strategy is one that locks your brand into an approach for the foreseeable future based on clear data and harnessing the resources of the organisation to make that happen. It is a highly intentional strategy – motivating people to come together and work, in harmony, to accomplish defined goals. But is it the right strategy for your brand? To some, deliberate strategy may seem like a strange commitment in these chaotic times. But the decision really comes down to how your senior team, and indeed your wider culture, like to manage your brands: decisively; dy ..read more

Reading Time: 7 minutes It’s healthy to adopt a brand enemy. Handled well, having such an adversary works for your customers and your culture. Brand enemies are a powerful source of motivation and focus. It’s human nature to be united by the things we have in common and those we want to see change. But choose your enemy carefully and deliberately. It may just be that your best brand enemy is not the one you think of first. In this post, we examine: The link between enemy and identity Defining a brand enemy The connection to brand culture Examples of a brand enemy The six types of brand enemy E ..read more

Reading Time: 5 minutes Sectors have conventions. In fact, a brand category is really a set of vertically-held behaviours and attitudes. That’s what you’re really confronting when you set about challenging a brand category. As Paige Lansing Valle of Emotive Brand identifies in a white paper on brand category creation, “People hold on tightly to their established understandings of what a category is and what it offers. Choosing the right category is about defining, or framing, what people are buying in such a way that your value shines through.” If you think about it, fast-fashion clothing bran ..read more

Reading Time: 2 minutes Over tea with Alex in the sun a couple of afternoons ago, we got talking about what you can count on in a market, and what you can observe but not necessarily depend on. I’ll leave it to Alex to share the specifics of what she talked about in her own inimitable way, but our conversation did get me thinking about the different kinds of customers that brands have today because in the face for scale, it’s easy to confuse the different levels of interest and loyalty. Let’s start with what happens when you get waves of visitors. It’s tempting to have your head turned by the ..read more

Reading Time: 10 minutes On the face of it, building a sustainable brand looks relatively straight-forward. After all many brands already claim to be doing this. That’s both good news – and misleading. Taking the time to build a sustainable brand requires patience, focus and an ability to rethink priorities. It’s inspiring to see brands addressing their environmental impact, focusing on improving social injustices and actively supporting animal rights through their sponsorship or business practices. But it’s also deceptive – because, as this review of H&M discusses, a handful of initiative ..read more

Reading Time: 5 minutes It’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 what the brand wants them to value – and act on. All three may well have different sign-offs within the organisation. Separation makes the brand grow weaker But the problem with not linking your strategy, culture and stories is that a lot gets lost ..read more

Reading Time: 10 minutes Many people believe that an innovation will sell itself; that if they present a solution that is well crafted, brimming with features and solves the problem they have identified, then they will enjoy success. But catering to unmet customer needs, while potentially lucrative, is nowhere near as simple as just presenting buyers with something new. Why do customer needs go unmet? Customer needs go unmet for three key reasons. The need may exist but no-one has presented customers with a solution they want to buy. A solution is available but customers don’t see or believe t ..read more

Reading Time: 2 minutes Great products sell themselves. No they don’t. But equally, people don’t just buy brands because they’re brands either. Familiarity matters, but for the most part today’s customers are far too sophisticated to buy just anything with a nice or familiar name attached to it. Or rather to keep buying it without question. A brand by itself doesn’t guarantee you anything. Sometimes companies with brands that were once iconic forget that. They somehow believe that because the branding process can add margin, all brands must equal margin and presence must equal profit. Wrong. S ..read more

Reading Time: < 1 minute My friend Simon is a designer. One of his favourite lines is “Great kerning will save the world”. Chances are if you’re an art director or a designer or, if like me, you work with art directors and designers every day, you’ll find this amusing because it references a whole bunch of things about the discipline, the passion and the perspectives of those committed to impeccably forged design. If you’re not a designer, you probably didn’t even grin. That’s OK. It’s not your dialect. Language is about so much more than communication and meaning. It is filled with ideas a ..read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes In a world dominated it seems by the push for scale and mass coverage, it’s easy to forget that sometimes the smartest thing you can do is the polar opposite: develop a deliberately limited edition brand that shuns the mainstream. I’ve written about this a number of times – here’s an example – and coined the phrase cultrepreneurs to describe those enterprising individuals who have chosen to create and market brands with cult status. As this story about Julian Van Winkle and his Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery shows, there is nothing accidental about why his aged bourbon a ..read more