When your product works and your brand matters. Every product or service must work. People must find it useful. And beneficial. Otherwise it will enter that brutal phase in the business cycle: creative destruction. But the contribution a product or service makes to society is not limited to its features and intrinsics. Its brand - the stuff "outside of the [...]
This critique first appeared on Bizcommunity.com on 29 January 2016. “Blood, sweat and tears will get you there, but joy… (pause) will take you further,” Jude Laws confides to me, almost personally, in Johnnie Walker’s new campaign. Hmm. What is happening to “Keep walking”? A few years ago, you could see the tinkering going on [...]
(An edited version of this article first appeared in the Financial Mail on 15 December 2015.) Business strategy and brand strategy: the twin strands of a company's DNA. In our experience, a lot of leaders battle to articulate their business’s purpose. They struggle to find what Professor Cynthia Montgomery, the past head of the Strategy Unit [...]
(This article first appeared in the Financial Mail's Redzone on 23 September 2015) Brand development’s biggest challenge – brand valuation. The Coca-Cola brand accounted for 54% of the company’s stock market value in 2007, according to Jan Lindermann, a former Global MD of Interbrand. I’m assuming the figure is not significantly different today. In case [...]
How, specifically, can we help you? Your 'difference that matters.' In our experience, a lot of businesses battle to articulate their Purpose - the first step in establishing their Business Strategy. We're good at articulation. We can help. A difference that matters - what is yours? Brand development can deliver what the intrinsics of your business may [...]
The void waiting to be filled. Where do people find meaning in modern society? Where are the leaders to guide us? Where are the lighthouses to help us navigate our lives? Our need for meaning is as strong as ever, but where do we find the nourishment which we sense is missing? In the glamorous lifestyles of celebrities? In the quick-fixes of pop-psychology? In the slick, misinformation of [...]
Thoroughness. Maybe our Germanic roots are showing, but we don't feel comfortable if we don’t do our homework. We dislike skimming around on the surface of things. We prefer icebergs to ice-floes. This is why the iceberg is our logo. We spend a great deal of time out of sight, below the surface, doing our [...]
We like the way Lawrence Freedman puts it. "Strategy is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It is the art of creating power." (1) The art of creating power. (2) Getting more out of a situation than the starting balance would suggest. These two phrases capture our belief [...]
We need to build a bridge from one side of a ravine to the other. On one side of the ravine is your business. On the other, the people you would like to reach. We pretty much apply the rigour engineers would, faced with a similar challenge. So we put on our engineering hard hats - we start [...]
Your people aren't your most valuable asset. Your brand is. A study of companies by BusinessWeek showed that “on average, brands account for more than one-third of shareholder value.” This is not, as you may immediately think, a figure for consumer brands; it’s a figure across both consumer and corporate brands.* Jan Lindermann, the former global GM [...]
