I can’t tell you how to build your brand. Only you will know how to do that. Only you know and control the combination of culture, values, promises, products, services, profit, non-profit, audience, market, location, online, offline, investment, revenue, story, profile, awareness and too many other things to list here that...
A couple of weeks ago when writing about loyalty starting on the inside of an organisation, I noted that a key element in building loyalty was consistency, with the promise I’d expand on the topic. Whether you make stuff or sell services; whether you’re in a B2B or B2C business, non-profit,...
The holy grail for organisations is customer loyalty. Less talked about but more important to building a brand is employee loyalty. Simply put, you can’t build a great (or even good) brand if you are constantly replacing people. A recent article in Inc. outlines the four things that help earn employee loyalty (and, no,...
In October 2010 I featured a story about TOMS Shoes – a social business that promises to give a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair you purchase. It’s a hell of a promise and my story celebrated them reaching a million shoes. This past month they...
I was talking to a reporter about the so-called Coca-Cola “weight washing” announcements last week and it got me thinking about a broader issue. We all have ideas on what promises organisations should be making, but that isn’t our job. Coca-Cola doesn’t promise to keep you thin. They do promise to “refresh the world and...
I’ve been asked by a number of people what my “brand” take on the Labor Party shenanigans is. I’ll start by saying I’m an interested observer of politics, but by no means am I a political commentator (shudder). And since returning to Oz from the US I’ve been, by turn, bemused,...
What’s our vision? What’s our mission? Where do we want to be in three years, five years, 10 years? So much of what we think about, talk about and focus on in organisations is driven by thinking around that imagined future. But what about ‘what is’? Well that’s no fun I hear...
Volkswagen has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. And the company response, or lack of it, carry some good lessons for SMEs who may find themselves in similar situations with products gone wrong and unhappy customers at the gates. I won’t go into the nuts of bolts...
I often talk about brand as being evolution not revolution. And reading a book over the weekend about the impact of denial by leaders on everything from business to economies, I was reminded again about how easy it is to get caught in the mindless “rebrand” cycle and miss the real opportunities...
I am a Brand. I am much more than a logo, name or marketing campaign. I am sometimes a verb (when used on cattle), more often a noun. You can find me somewhere between a feeling and the organisation. I can be a promise, a principle, a point of engagement, an organising system, a...