A business based on brand is, very simply, a business primed for success.
The truth is the best brands, like the most interesting people, have a keen sense of self.
Do not allow your enemy to define you. Because if you allow yourself to be defined negatively, nothing positive you say about yourself will register.
Brand is everything, the stuff you want to communicate to consumers and the stuff you communicate despite yourself.
Good brands do three things for highly stressed out consumers: 1. They save time. 2. They project the right message. 3. They provide an identity.
It is not easy to build a great brand. It takes leadership to persuade the rest of the company to follow your vision. It takes an artistic sense of proportion and timing. It takes a ruthless willingness to distinguish yourself from competing brands and, hopefully, bury them in the process.
It's not fair, but it's not entirely wrong to presume that the more capable people will come from the better brand.
Every brand builder will face a million temptations to obscure, dilute, or confuse his or her brand message. These temptations fall under two general headings: boredom and the desire for growth.
A strong brand is the only thing that can tip the balance of power between distributors and a manufacturer back into the manufacturer's favor.
Finding an excuse not to buy a brand can be just as enjoyable as finding an excuse to buy one. That, too, is human nature.
While the importance of a strong brand is widely understood, nothing is as misunderstood in American business as the question of how to use it.
The real lesson Orville (Redenbacher) taught me was the power of a good brand to trump all rhyme or reason in the marketplace.
The great lesson of the Internet revolution is not that people never want personal service, just that they won't pay for personal service that does not add real value to the transaction.
