Lessons in Brand Leadership: Brand-Building Key Steps

In looking at major marketing success stories of the last fifty years, one item remains crucial in their survival against the test of time: the importance of brand building as a long-term intangible asset. Below are the top nine lessons of brand building, cultivated from a careful study of some of these leaders in Erich Joachimsthaler’s book, Brand Leadership:

1. Brand building is not just advertising. Brand building requires investment internally into a company culture and the creation of a lasting and permanent identity that creates value and meaning for consumers, extending beyond any one marketing campaign.
2. Brand building involves innovation.Taking risks and expanding offerings are critical to the growth of a brand. No brand was ever invigorated by keeping things See examples of innovation in some of our recent posts on the power of platformizationin innovating your company’s connections to its customers.
3. Excellence in execution creates huge payoffs. Having dynamic and direct execution of your brand purpose, language, and vision in all that you do makes your brand more than an idea and gives it the equity that brand strategists strive for.
4. Products are key to the brand. Aligning product purpose with brand essence, value, and related value propositions is salient to retaining authenticity in presentation of the brand.
5. The brand is more than products.While launching a new product line can be a great step toward achieving new growth and building a new identity, new products are not synonymous with a new brand. Many times, altering value-based offerings instead of product offerings can be even more effective in generating growth.
6. Know the brand identity.Every actor within your organization should be aware of and emotionally in tune to your brand, living out the identity in their day-to-day activities at work and communicating this identity in all collateral.
7. The brand team should run the brand.Having a team with a clear, articulated purpose in maintaining the brand identity and ensuring its execution is a necessary staffing addition that will have impressive long-term payoff.
8. Connect with customers on an emotional level.Value creation comes at its strongest execution when it is accompanied by a personal, human connection between brand and consumer.
9. Use subbrands to tell a story and manage perceptions.The power of brand architecture in strengthening and bolstering overall brand equity and power is one that should not be underestimated.