What Great Brands Do

The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest

Denise Lee Yohn

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118611258
• eBook ISBN: 9781118824337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Discover proven strategies for building powerful, world-class brands

It's tempting to believe that brands like Apple, Nike, and Zappos achieved their iconic statuses because of serendipity, an unattainable magic formula, or even the genius of a single visionary leader. However, these companies all adopted specific approaches and principles that transformed their ordinary brands into industry leaders. In other words, great brands can be built—and Denise Lee Yohn knows exactly how to do it. Delivering a fresh perspective, Yohn's What Great Brands Do teaches an innovative brand-as-business strategy that enhances brand identity while boosting profit margins, improving company culture, and creating stronger stakeholder relationships. Drawing from twenty-five years of consulting work with such top brands as Frito-Lay, Sony, Nautica, and Burger King, Yohn explains key principles of her brand-as-business strategy.

• Reveals the seven key principles that the world's best brands consistently implement
• Presents case studies that explore the brand building successes and failures of companies of all sizes including IBM, Lululemon, Chipotle Mexican Grill, and other remarkable brands
• Provides tools and strategies that organizations can start using right away

Filled with targeted guidance for CEOs, COOs, entrepreneurs, and other organization leaders, What Great Brands Do is an essential blueprint for launching any brand to meteoric heights.

Chapter 1

Great Brands Start Inside

Sam Palmisano was a twenty-nine-year IBM veteran when he took the reins of the beleaguered company as CEO in 2002. He had started as a salesman at IBM in 1973, but in the intervening years the IBM brand had lost its cachet and become seen as increasingly irrelevant.1 The entire company nearly imploded during the 1990s, when almost half of IBM’s 400,000 employees lost their jobs. “If you lived through this, as I did,” Palmisano told Harvard Business Review in 2004, “it was easy to see how the company’s values had become part of the problem.”2 The prized beliefs put forward by IBM’s iconic founder—which included “respect for the individual” and “the pursuit of excellence”—had settled into a managerial culture of entitlement and arrogance. Palmisano determined to put the company on a new path by resetting IBM’s stagnant, insular culture.

Palmisano’s choice to change culture was hardly a typical move, especially at a company the size of IBM. The more common and attractive route for leaders in Palmisano’s position is to overhaul the company’s communication strategies—advertising, marketing, and promotions—and put a new fresh face on the company and its products. It’s always easier to change what you say about your company than it is to actually change your company. Giving your image and message a public makeover is also the fastest way to get the attention of investors and customers alike. Conventional wisdom suggests that would have been the logical place for Palmisano to start rebuilding the IBM brand.

But what Palmisano recognized, as certain other visionary CEOs have, is that if you don’t develop greatness among your employees, your employees are unlikely to deliver greatness to your customers. Clever advertising and a freshened-up logo will prove to be pointless exercises if cultural problems within the company prevent the company from delivering on its new promises. One of the fundamental ways an organization resets and strengthens its brand is through strengthening its culture. More than any other influence, company culture shapes the distinctive way employees behave as they turn the brand promise into breakthrough customer experiences.

Unless and until your culture is expressed clearly through your customer experience, you have nothing worth communicating. Your brand can’t just be a promise; it must be a promise delivered. So your starting point is cultivating a strong internal corporate culture that aligns and integrates with your brand. Then you need to rally all your external stakeholders around those common cultural values. And finally you need to use your culture to optimize the company’s operations and engage everyone who touches the brand in delivering a focused, unique customer experience. What follows is an outline of this three-step process and the tools and approaches that help great brands accomplish each step. When you can’t see any daylight between what you believe, what you practice, what you offer, and what you say about yourself, you are doing what great brands do.

Putting Internal Brand Culture First

Modifying IBM’s culture was particularly critical for Palmisano in 2002 because IBM’s industry and market position were both undergoing significant change. The company had once been a computer hardware powerhouse, with software and business services playing second fiddle in its operations. By the time Palmisano took the CEO’s chair, the two roles were reversed. The service side of IBM now produced the bulk of revenues and profits.3 Palmisano had to lead the organization to meet the requirements of this new business model and he had to set expectations inside and outside the company for how his people would work—and ultimately succeed—within it.

As Palmisano noted, “When your business is primarily based on knowledge, [then] people—rather than products—become your brand. Just as our products have had to be consistent with the IBM brand promise, now more than ever, so do our people.”4 With more than 300,000 employees in 170 countries, Palmisano estimated that 40 percent of his workforce did not report daily to an IBM site—they either worked at client sites, from home, or were mobile.5 Working from such far-flung locations with such low levels of direct supervision, employees would need what Palmisano called “a globally consistent set of values.” He also knew that IBM’s business scope would continue to change. “Managers come and go,” he observed. “The business portfolio changes, so the only thing that endures is our culture.”6

In July 2003, Palmisano used IBM’s vast intranet communication network and collaboration software to initiate what he called a “ValuesJam.” For seventy-two hours, employees all around the world were asked to riff on certain values themes that IBM executives had identified in a series of surveys and focus groups beforehand. The goal was to align every employee’s daily focus with the values underlying the IBM brand. In Palmisano’s words, “we needed to affirm IBM’s reason for being, what sets the company apart.”7

As with a musical jam session, the result was a discordant mix of inspiration and noise. The negativity and cynicism of some comments made them jarring to read, and at least one member of Palmisano’s executive team wanted to cut the Jam short after eight hours. But Palmisano was determined to follow through on the promise of an unfiltered, uncensored seventy-two-hour exchange of ideas, because the process would ultimately help legitimize the end result. In the words of one IBMer who helped run the Jam, “If a bunch of execs go off in a closed room someplace, smoke a bunch of cigars and then emerge with some claim that this is what our values would be, it’s going to be meaningless.” He added, “After all, Enron had a set of values.”8

By the time the Jam had ended, fifty thousand IBM employees had logged in to read the debates, and ten thousand of them had left messages.9 Palmisano took home a three-foot-high stack of documents that represented a cross-section of more than one million messages. IBM analysts used classification software to crunch all the postings and a small team was commissioned to work with the themes that emerged. The outcome of the process was three new interpretations of IBM’s founding beliefs:10

• Dedication to every client’s success.
• Innovation that matters—for our company and the world.
• Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships.

Most people would agree that these are good values for any workplace to have. Who would argue otherwise? But IBM imbued these values with much more importance. Palmisano called them “IBM’s mission as an enterprise.”11 The values were intended to distill what IBM uniquely offers and delivers. As a result, IBM employees understood that these values describe what makes the IBM brand distinctive and valuable. Every company would like to have a strong workplace culture supported by inspiring values. With great brands, however, the culture and the values don’t play supporting roles in business operations—culture and values are the brand, and they’re used to inform business decisions and employee actions.

Making Culture Matter

The conversation about corporate culture that has recently flooded the pages of business books and journals has emphasized the need for a clear purpose and values. But true cultural change at your company hasn’t occurred until all your employees, whether top leaders or field workers, are using your values to inform their daily behavior—with customers and with each other.

Culture building can’t be simply invertising—internal communications efforts that treat employees as passive audiences who are expected to buy what the leadership or marketing team is selling. Feeling good about the organization and having a positive outlook on its future are important, but they’re not likely to prompt changes in employees’ design and delivery of customer experiences. Great brands use culture building to educate—to help employees understand what a brand is and why it’s important. They use it to define—to explain what the brand stands for and how it is differentiating. They use it to activate—to help people understand their own impact on brand perceptions and therefore what is expected of them.

The challenge then becomes what I often call the “head + heart + hands and feet” problem. For your employees to understand, embrace, and deliver your brand, they need to know its values in their heads, feel inspired by them in their hearts, and then put them into action with their hands and feet. Processes such as IBM’s ValuesJam and any number of other culture-building efforts are meant to engage heads and hearts. But values won’t make a difference unless they stimulate changes in behavior—hands and feet.

Operationalizing your brand through company culture requires a focus on design, empowerment, and impact. You want to design the organization and its business model so it delivers on the brand values and attributes. You want to empower your people with the tools and resources to infuse the brand into their day-to-day decisions and behaviors. Finally, you want to make such a positive impact on your employees’ lives and their careers that they support your brand’s message and mission because they know their own destinies and your brand’s destiny are intertwined. One mark of a great brand is that even former employees remain proud to say they helped make the brand great.

Enduring pride is just one of many benefits companies realize when they use their brands and their brand messages to increase employee engagement, rather than resorting to generic corporate initiatives. A brand is the strongest engagement tool a business has precisely because of its power to connect. Employees who are engaged with the brand:

• Connect to customers more effectively because they understand the value the company produces and delivers to them.
• Connect to each other more fully because they are united by a common objective and common set of values.
• Ultimately, connect to the brand’s higher purpose and find that their work holds more meaning and importance to them because they see their own roles in the broader mission of the organization.

Brand engagement is in short supply these days. The Gallup organization asked more than three thousand randomly selected workers to assess their agreement with the statement “I know what my company stands for and what makes our brand(s) different from our competitors.” Just 41 percent of employees strongly agreed with this statement, while 24 percent either disagreed or were equivocal. These results suggest that “too many companies are failing to help their workers understand what makes their company different and better than the rest,” the report concludes.12 And if your employees don’t understand that, how can they help your brand achieve greatness?

Tool: Using a Brand Toolbox to Ensure Brand Alignment

Method Products is a company that had started out with a freewheeling seat-of-the-pants culture driven by the purpose of crashing the multibillion-dollar household cleaner and detergent industry. But as co-founders Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry explained in their book, The Method Method, rapid growth posed a problem of how to preserve the company’s magic without drowning it in workplace procedures and protocols.13

Ryan and Lowry raised the question with people at a handful of companies they admire, including Apple, Google, Pixar, Nike, and Starbucks. Three recommendations emerged from those discussions: Hire people whose personalities fit the existing culture, offer instruction in the culture from the start of their employment, and give all employees lots of feedback on what the company’s values and culture really mean.14

A subsequent company-wide process defined Method’s values as a “Methodology” of caring, collaboration, and innovation, topped off by two values that really distinguish the Method brand: “Keep Method weird” and “What would MacGyver do?” To help with the “head + heart + hands and feet” challenge, the company each year prints up a fresh deck of playing card–style flash cards that illustrate how the various values translate into explicit brand-building behavior—the card defining MacGyver-style resourcefulness reads “not accepting no for an answer” and “looking under rocks” for what others have missed.15 Each deck of cards is bound by a key ring, so it’s easy to share and can be hung on an employee’s desk for easy reference.16

Without hands-on tools like the deck of flash cards, you run the risk of having employees who may truly believe in the values behind their brand but can’t see the relevance of those values to themselves and their jobs. I frequently work with clients to build what I call a “Brand Toolbox” of content and decision guides to drive the approaches and behaviors needed to operationalize their brand values. The Brand Toolbox—developed over a period of months and published and distributed in a wide variety of ways including workbooks and downloadable PDFs, depending on the company communications style and infrastructure—informs managers and employees by communicating what the brand platform is and by providing principles to guide brand execution. It also inspires people with images, stories, and quotes. It gets them excited about the brand and motivates them to change their behavior in support of it. At its best, the Brand Toolbox instructs—it helps people make decisions and take actions that are “on brand” by including explicit instructions and clear-cut tools.

The contents of a Brand Toolbox depend on the specific needs of the company but usually a Brand Toolbox contains

• An explanation of your brand strategy along with background and rationale so that everyone can understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and definitions of key terms so everyone grasps the meaning behind the words
• Principles and guidelines for delivering brand values and attributes at key touchpoints between your brand and the outside world
• Sample applications for how the brand should be expressed and delivered
• Guides that walk people through important ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Great Brands Start Inside
• Chapter 2: Great Brands Avoid Selling Products
• Chapter 3: Great Brands Ignore Trends
• Chapter 4: Great Brands Don’t Chase Customers
• Chapter 5: Great Brands Sweat the Small Stuff
• Chapter 6: Great Brands Commit and Stay Committed
• Chapter 7: Great Brands Never Have to “Give Back”
• Chapter 8: The Eighth Principle
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• More from Wiley
• Index