The role of leaders within an organisation in building the brand can’t be understated. I quite simply have never seen a strong and resilient brand result if it is not driven and supported by the leadership of the organisation. And when I say leadership, I mean literally the CEO, GM, owner,...
A new campaign by BMW is a timely reminder that you can only be great at one thing. Finding that one thing. Focusing who you are and what you do around that one thing. Making decisions big and small to support that one thing. This is fundamental to building your brand. Knowing...
In the absence of expectations being set about what I can or can’t do, it is perfectly reasonable that you as the customer or other stakeholder will apply your own expectations to the situation. But here’s the problem with that. It dooms me to fail. Because there is no way that I can...
Great brands are built by people. But not just any people. They have to be the right people. Right for who? Right for your organisation. And that will be a different mix depending on what you care about and what you do (pretty much in that order). The connection between building...
This is not the article I was going to write. I had a whole different one started about setting expectations. But then while reading about the recent promise fail by Domino’s, I saw this: “Phil McDonald, the Brisbane managing director of advertising agency George Patterson Y&R, said the fallout was another example of...
If you are starting a new business, I think the key ingredient to success, more than funding, more than ideas, more than planning and strategy, is passion. If you don’t have that you’ll never get past the grind. And, even more importantly in the early days, your passion is pretty much...
After one too many tweets appeared in my stream using the terms personal brand and personal branding I’d had about as much as I could take and tweeted the following: “Need a twitter filter to auto delete tweets using the term “personal branding” – unless you have a hot piece of...
I’m going to keep this short and sweet. I’ve recently had a number of conversations with people where my brand advice to them ended with the following statement: Everyone is not your customer. It should be obvious and some companies do get it. Too many don’t. There are plenty of ways you can...
Something strange happened last year. Metro Trains, who are not especially known for effective communications, decided (were convinced) to make a video. The video was a fun little ditty called “Dumb Ways to Die” and targeted the stupid things people do that get them killed, some of which were stupid things people do...
It’s coming up to the big daddy Hallmark holiday of the year, Valentine’s Day, so it seemed appropriate to share some love. There are a lot of brands that I like. I like what the organisations do and how they do it and that they stand for something. There are also a...