John Lewis launches L.A. crafted denim for the British high street: AND/OR, its first in-house denim lifestyle brand. Authentically L.A. crafted denim sits at the heart of the brand and is complimented by an impressive range of versatile womenswear, shoes, accessories and lingerie. Playful and youthful, the label channels ease and effortlessness throughout, comprising pieces that seamlessly slot into any wardrobe.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Agency: adam&eveDDB
Chief Creative Officer: Richard Brim
Written & Art Directed by Creative Team: Selma Ahmed & Genevieve De Rohan Wilner
Chief Executive Officer: Tammy Einav
Business Director: Caroline Grayson
Account Managers: Nina Godinho & Tom Peters
Producers: Matt Craigie Atherton & Amy Coomber
Assistant Producer: Hayley Carter
Strategy: Martin Beverley
Production company: Stink
Director: Samy Mosher
Executive Producer: Tor Fitzwilliams
Producer: Josh Barwick
Cinematographer: Jackson Hunt
Editing Company: Final Cut
Editor: Daniel Sherwen
Post Production: The Mill
Colourist: James Bamford
Producer: Alex Fitzgerald
Audio Post Production: Factory Studios
Audio Engineer: Jack Hallett
Music Supervision: SIREN
Music Supervisor: Sian Rogers
Music Track: Makeba by Jain

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Marketers are under huge pressure to succeed. But how should we judge a successful brand? And what should brands do to stay successful?

Mark Ritson once observed that: “Throughout history, one challenge has done more damage to leading brands than any other: success.” Absolutely. In the wrong hands, brand success quickly breeds complacency. Instead of continuing to accelerate away, some brands call time on pressing home the advantage, and pay a heavy price. Here are six ways that brands count themselves as successful, together with some thoughts on what they should do if they want to stay that way.

1. Everybody Knows Your Name – for some brands, top of mind = top of market. These brands look at the headlines they’re gathering and the social followings they’ve accumulated and judge themselves to be on the road to riches. In fact, the world seems to once again have fallen in love with brands that everyone knows (but that don’t have a business model). Platform is a much-used word today, and on the face of it, seems like the perfect springboard. But influence and authority are useless if they do not convert to cashflow. And that won’t happen ultimately if the business model is unsure, the audience fickle, and the product can be quickly emulated by others.

2. Your Asking Price Is Not Even Being Questioned – the sign of a powerful brand in my view is one that consistently commands a margin beyond what the market naturally assigns. If your brand is highly profitable, that’s one of the most reliable signs of success going. The key thing to watch here is what’s fueling that margin surplus. Brands that are tapping market supply shortfalls or monopolies to drive up profitability should have a “plan B” based on the time-proven assumption that a rival will arrive to spoil the party and take a share of the bonanza. Brands with strong profit-taking driven by customer loyalty need to make sure they have the imagination and the resources to stay surprising. Because brands that lose interest quickly lose advantage.

3. Your Product Is Flying Out The Door – in this age of demand-gen, the focus can quickly shift to revenue at the expense of profitability. Top-line is beguiling because it always seems to reflect the sentiment of the market and the propensity of consumers for more. But ultimately if your cost-per-sale and cost-per-serve are crippling, no amount of backslapping over conversion rates is going to save your brand. As consumer expectations continue to climb, it’s tempting for CMOs under strong demand pressure to succumb to short term tactics to get them through the quarters. But pay a lot of attention to your end return. Sometimes it’s better to throttle supply or find new, more effective ways to sell or serve, in order to re-set what’s coming back by way of returns. As a brand, you always want to be wanted more – but not too much more (because then that’s frustrating).

4. You Are Where Everyone Wants To Be Seen – every brand wants to be available. But you can be too available, too easy to find. And that will drive down interest (by lowering intrigue) and drive up your inventory costs as sales stall. Every brand also wants to be seen in the right places, and for some, particularly start-ups, the prospect of being stocked by a big name retailer can be a real head turner. Almost inevitably though, you’re paying for that privilege on a number of fronts. Truly successful brands look to retain as much control over where they are seen and how they are traded. If presence threatens to cost you control and/or viable margin, you should tread very carefully. You can get plenty of love from being seen in the right places – but that love can also smother you in supply agreement demands that eat your brand from the inside out.

5. Your Customers Queue For Hours – you have customers who are loyal to you, and who buy up whatever you release. You can barely keep up with demand. What could possibly be wrong? Well, it all comes down to who decides these people are loyal. It’s easy for marketers to assign loyalty to a range of seemingly consistent behaviors. But those signals in themselves can be deceptive. Banking on customer loyalty is highly tempting but equally dangerous, because it comes with a bunch of assumptions that foster complacency on the one hand and expectation on the other. The other thing about loyalty is that it can fade or be distracted quicker than ever today. Unlike some, I do believe it exists – to a point – but to nothing like the rates, or anything like the timeframes, that many cite. To get a sense of how vulnerable you are, and therefore how much loyalty leeway you have, look around at companion sectors and ask yourself how contagious their volatility is.

6. Everyone Wants To Know What You Think – once again, influence like awareness is much talked-about today. But you don’t have to look far to see brands and brand owners that captured the ear of the press and were lauded for their business acumen, only to have their businesses disintegrate. When everyone’s asking you questions, are you still prepared to ask yourself the hard questions as a leader? Because without them, your brand can fall away as you become distracted by the attention and the praise. The smartest entrepreneurs treat the media well, and above all treat them with respect, but they also understand that their business is theirs, and that when it impinges on the brand’s business in terms of time and attention, it has the potential to be distracting. If you have influence, leverage it morally and well, but don’t allow the knowledge of it to overly-influence your brand. Compete the way you did to become successful. Leaders that compete as though they deserve leadership, and the respect that comes with it, seldom stay leaders.

Ultimately, success is a state of mind. It’s determined by those in charge of the business, and it influences not just their confidence levels but also their appetites for investment and risk. The way to stay competitive is to be competitive. The brands that stop to admire how well they are doing, that believe they no longer need to compete because they have made it, or that fail to push forward for fear of losing what they have, are the ones that most risk losing what they have fought so hard to gain.

Don’t Let The Future Leave Your Brand Behind. Join Us At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Most organizations neglect the importance of developing a strong brand culture before communicating their value to the outside world. Management from these companies haven’t thought about how they can expect their employees to deliver a consistent brand experience to their customers when they are not offered a culture of brand consistency themselves.

Humans are reflective beings and we are likely to transmit our experiences with a brand to anyone who approaches us from colleagues to customers, from distributors to suppliers.

Putting brand culture first and making it matter are the main challenges when aiming for a successful brand building strategy from within. There are two approaches to be taken towards building a strong brand culture:

1. Brand Toolbox: Ensure Alignment

There are a few must-haves to facilitate the implementation of a brand toolbox and ensure a better brand culture alignment in an organization:

• Explanation of the brand strategy together with its reasoning and background to help employees understand why your brand does what it does the way it does. A common understanding is important so defining key terms will be of help;
• Detailed principles and guidelines of how your brand should resonate with the outside world and how the company expects its employees to engage as touchpoints;
• Real life examples of how the brand is supposed to be delivered and expressed;
• Map of the decision-making process to assist on the efficacy of your employees’ in taking the lead when necessary.

The brand toolbox is obviously not a brand-style or standards guide. The toolbox is about substance and how you bring your brand to life.

2. Brand Culture Initiatives: Increase Brand Understanding

Rolling out brand culture initiatives or programs is an important part of creating the right alignment within an organization. Participation should not be a privilege or limited to just a few of the company’s departments but an overarching process that includes the entire organization. This will help ensure alignment and communicate the company’s commitment towards creating a sense of ownership of its brand among all stakeholders.

Here are a few ideas on how you can design and execute brand culture initiatives as well as some real life examples from companies who excel at it:

• Deliver dynamic presentations followed by facilitated discussions, games, and interactive exercises (i.e. Starbucks has created a walk-through exercise for its senior level management in which everyone can experience the entire process of making a cup of its coffee from the planting of the coffee seeds to the in-store technology and front-staff service training to creating a common understanding of the brand’s promise);
• Create high-energy creative sessions such as a photo scavenger hunt in which groups photograph examples of brand touchpoints as well as themselves demonstrating the brand’s attributes and values. Engage these groups in assembling a collage of the pictures taken, adding captions and headlines to them, and then explaining the brand’s attributes and values to the other groups;
• A more content-driven session was held by Sony who organized customer listening booths where end users’ experiences were recorded and employees were asked to analyze, evaluate, and give ideas on how the brand experience could be improved based on the feedback they have received;
• A simpler but also effective approach is to conduct a quiz about the brand platform, target customers, and company priorities to ensure understanding and effectiveness of the previously adapted brand toolbox.

Extend Your Brand Culture Externally

IKEA has successfully extended its brand standards, values, and principles throughout its entire network of partners. Everyone connected with IKEA understands the brand’s cultural practices of protecting the environment and its emphasis on creating favorable employee working conditions, to name two.

Adapting a brand toolbox as well as launching brand culture initiatives that include different external stakeholders requires a broad understanding of their needs and perspectives of your brand. It is important that managers understand how to spot brand culture gaps in external partners such as third-party staffing service providers, advertising and marketing agencies, suppliers, channel partners, and others.

Extending your brand culture externally is an important consideration as it provides the opportunity for greater outcomes for all.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Thiago Lucenti, The Concept X

Don’t Let The Future Leave Your Brand Behind. Join Us At The Un-Conference – Marketing’s Only Problem Solving Event.

The Blake Project Can Help: Please email us for more about our brand culture expertise.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Today I break with my usual Brand Book Bites format of author interview and book overview to share about the book Shoe Dog:  A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.  This wonderful book combines corporate memoir (Knight recounts some of the most significant moments in the early years of Nike’s founding) with personal confessional (Knight reveals with surprising candor his fears, vulnerabilities, and mistakes).  I suggest you read Bill Gates’ write-up about the book which perfectly captures its essence.  And while I agree with Gates’ assessment that it doesn’t seem Knight set out to teach the reader anything, I do think it conveys some important lessons and observations about starting a business and building a brand — and that is what I want to share here.  So here a just a few of the gems of wisdom that I gleaned from Shoe Dog:

Running a business is — or should be — like running itself.  I’ve found that too many people operate their businesses as if it were only a means to an end — making lots of money, selling lots of stuff, being “successful.”  All of that can be true, but it also seems that running a business can be an end unto itself.  The motivation can, or as Knight seems to suggest, must come from within yourself.

In writing about his idea to start a running shoe company, Knight observed, “Few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish line; it’s that you define the finish line. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself.”

Believe in what you’re doing — or no one else will.  As an entrepreneur, you must be utterly convinced that what you’re doing is worth doing if you expect anyone else to do so also.  As Knight reflected on why he was so much better at selling shoes than mutual funds, he asked himself, “So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”

Managing inventory, not marketing, is the key to your viability.  A wise colleague of mine Jeff Harbaugh often writes in his MarketWatch column for the action sports industry about how managing inventory is more important than marketing these days.  It’s a concept that many brand-builders bristle at, but even Knight, perhaps one of the greatest brand-builders of our time, believes it.  He wrote, “Supply and demand is always the root problem in business. It’s been true since Phoenician traders raced to bring Rome the coveted purple dye that colored the clothing of royals and rich people; there was never enough purple to go around. It’s hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it—this is how companies die, how ulcers are born.”

Your brand should characterize your culture, and vice versa.  In my book, What Great Brands Do, I explain that Great Brands Start Inside — meaning, great brands start brand-building by cultivating a strong brand-led culture inside their organizations.  Nike’s story supports and explains this notion that brand and culture are inextricably linked.

When Knight was trying to convince an attorney, Rob Strasser, to join the company after having represented it in a lawsuit, Knight said to him, “You’re one of us.”  “One of us,” Knight wrote, “[Strasser] knew what those words meant. We were the kind of people who simply couldn’t put up with corporate nonsense. We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play. But meaningful play. We were trying to slay Goliath, and though Strasser was bigger than two Goliaths, at heart he was an utter David. We were trying to create a brand, I said, but also a culture. We were fighting against conformity, against boringness, against drudgery. More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea—a spirit.”

Be clear on the #1 thing you must do.  “Pay Nissho first.”  Knight wrote that this mantra was “my morning chant, my nightly prayer, my number one priority.”  Knight explained that he had concluded that paying his secondary bank, Nissho, was the #1 thing he and his company had to do every month in order to keep their line of credit at their primary bank secure — and they had to do that in order to have the cash to run the business.  Having that clarity kept the company alive.  Every leader needs to have such clarity.

Business is a noble cause.  Knight said it all:  “It seems wrong to call it ‘business.’ It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more…We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.”

related:

brand book bites from Onward by Starbucks CEO Schultz

In CSR, Nike Just Does It

brand book bites from Birth of a Brand by UGG Founder Brian Smith

The post brand book bites from Shoe Dog appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

This session will examine the enforcement landscape and consider best practices for navigating the world of disclosures.

TED Residents Steve Rosenbaum and Nikki Allen Webber break the ice (that’s Alison Cornyn in the background). [Photo: Dian Lofton / TED]

On March 6, TED welcomed its latest class to the TED Residency program. As an in-house incubator for breakthrough ideas, Residents spend four months in the TED office with other exceptional people from all over the map. Each has a project that promises to make a significant contribution to the world, across several different fields.

The new Residents include:

• A technologist working on app to promote world peace
• An entrepreneur whose packaging business wants to break America’s addiction to plastic
• A documentarian profiling young people of color grappling with mental-health challenges
• A journalist telling the stories of families and friends affected by deportation
• A programmer who wants to teach kids how to code … without computers
• A writer-photographer chronicling the lives of Chinese takeout workers in New York City
• A scientist studying an easier path to deeper sleep

TED Resident alumnus Cavaughn Noel and new TED Resident Evita Turquoise Robinson come together for the TEDStart event. [Photo: Dian Lofton / TED]

At the end of the program, Residents have the opportunity to give a TED Talk about their work and ideas in the theater at TED HQ. Read more about each Resident below:

The daughter of Syrian immigrants , Maytha Alhassen just received her Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity from USC. She was co-editor of Demanding Dignity: Young Voices From the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions, and her current work focuses on dignity’s central role in liberation movements.

Farhad Attaie wants to sound an alarm: child health is on the decline for the first time in generations. He is a co-founder of hellosmile, a community-focused healthcare startup that promotes preventative care for children.

Carlos Augusto Bautista Isaza is a Colombian creative technologist and interactive engineer whose work focuses on improving information access. He is currently developing MineSafe, a crowdsourced repository of safe walking paths for areas affected by landmines.

Jackson Bird is a video creator and activist. Since publicly coming out as transgender on YouTube, he has been using digital media to amplify transgender voices and promote accurate, respectful representation of transgender people.

New York–based designer Wendy Brawer is the creator of the Green Map, a tool that uses distinctive iconography to denote green-living, natural, social, and cultural resources. Locally led in 65 countries, GreenMap.org will soon relaunch with a new, open approach to inspire greater action on climate health and environmental justice among residents and travelers alike.

Formerly director of the MediaLab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marco Antonio Castro Cosío is a designer and technologist. His current project is Bus Roots, a program that puts gardens on the roofs of city buses—to capture rainwater and add green space while also providing a virtual-reality learning experience inside.

Award-winning artist Alison Cornyn is using photography and historical documents to create “Incorrigibles,” an installation and web platform that investigates the incarceration of young women in the US. She also teaches at the School of Visual Arts Design for Social Innovation MA program.

Daniel Gartenberg is a sleep scientist who is testing a new way to detect and improve sleep quality using wearable devices. He is validating his invention in collaboration with Penn State, the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Aging.

Journalist Duarte Geraldino is documenting the stories of US citizens who’ve lost friends and family to deportation. In the process, he is creating a national archive and shared resource to gauge the impact of the evolving US immigration policy.

TED Resident Bayete Ross Smith, a multimedia artist, meets fellow Resident Fred Kahl, also known at the Coney Island sideshow as sword swallower the Great Fredini. [Dian Lofton / TED]

Anurag Gupta is the founder and CEO of Be More, a social enterprise that employs proven training programs to eradicate unconscious bias. He is also an attorney and a mindfulness expert.

In her two decades of interviewing women and girls, filmmaker and journalist Sue Jaye Johnson documented dozens of stories about the isolation of shame. Now she is focusing on healthy, real-life sex stories from across generations, cultures and orientations—to expand the idea of what’s normal, what’s possible, and who we are as sexual beings.

Fred Kahl, a.k.a. the Great Fredini, is an artist, designer, magician, sword swallower and inventor who uses technology, imagination and play to create surreal, magical experiences. His project is a virtual reality recreation of Coney Island’s famous Luna Park—a turn-of-the-20th-century attraction that showcased fantasy architecture and technological futurism.

Anindya Kundu is a sociologist who studies the qualities that enable disadvantaged students to succeed, despite personal, social and institutional challenges. His book, Achieving Agency, is forthcoming.

A native of Finland, Linda Liukas is the creator of Hello Ruby, a children’s book that teaches programming skills without a computer. A programmer herself, Linda wants to make computers big again—so big that a child can crawl inside and learn how it works from the inside out.

TED Resident Paul Tasner, a first-time entrepreneur at 71, gets to know creative technologist Carlos Bautista, also a new Resident. [Photo: Dian Lofton / TED]

Beth Malone is an artist, curator and social entrepreneur who’s exploring ways art can reimagine (and improve) environment and circumstance. In her case, that includes coping with her father’s dementia, and helping others understand what it may mean if they are confronted with the disease.

Leslie Martinez is a designer and researcher who works at the intersection of immigration and design. She recently organized Hack the Ban, a hackathon that matched creatives and technologists with organizations supporting the Muslim and immigrant communities of New York City.

Matthew Nolan is a social entrepreneur and technologist who founded and developed Verona, an app that promotes world peace by introducing users to others with opposing views.

Evita Turquoise Robinson is the creator of the Nomadness Travel Tribe—a celebration of cultural harmony and curiosity spread by some 15,000 likeminded travelers of color. She is now considering what might happen if black communities use their buying power to invest in international property, while retaining a sense of social and economic consciousness.

Steven Rosenbaum is a digital entrepreneur, filmmaker, author and journalist (7 Days In September, MTV Unfiltered, Curation Nation). He sees the “fake news” crisis as an invitation to rethink the presentation of news, and help consumers tell the difference between fact and opinion.

Bayeté Ross Smith is a multimedia artist who is on the faculty at NYU and the International Center of Photography. His new project examines the mindset and traditions of people of color who serve in combat for the US military, despite knowing that they will continue to face oppression when they return home.

Writer-photographer Katie Salisbury is working on a multimedia project that will tell the stories of Chinese takeout workers in New York City and also examine the significance of Chinese food in American culture.

Disinterested in retirement, Paul Tasner instead launched PulpWorks, Inc., a packaging company that uses only waste paper, agricultural byproducts and textiles as raw materials. His goal is to reduce the billions of pounds of plastic packaging that enter our oceans, waterways and landfills each year.

After losing her nephew to suicide, Emmy-winning TV producer Nikki Webber Allen made it her mission to spark awareness of mental health issues in the African-American community. She believes that the cultural stigma of mental illness in communities of color keeps many people from seeking help, and she is working on a documentary to tell the candid stories of young people dealing with these disorders.

Applications for the Fall 2017 class (which runs September 11 to December 15) open on April 15 at ted.com/residency

By Gary Larkin As I have researched the impact of social media attacks on public companies— namely the recent campaign by President Trump—I have discovered that good advice is hard to find on this matter. That’s why I reached out to Katie Delahaye Paine, a pioneer in the field of communications measurement who has written […]

If you’re new to marketing or if you work at a start-up or small business that doesn’t not have the extensive experience and resources that other marketing professionals may have, you need some Marketing How To information and instruction.  So I recently ran a #MarketingMondays series LinkedIn.com.  Each week I provided a post and infographic on an essential marketing topic.  Now all five Marketing How To posts are here:

How To Set Your Marketing Budget in Five Steps

1. Outline your objectives.
2. Determine your budget range.
3. Set an annual calendar.
4. Use a 70/20/10 allocation plan.
5. Specify your measurements.

• Read the full post here:  It’s Budget Time
• Download the infographic here:  How To Set Your Marketing Budget in Five Steps Infographic

How To Select a Good Brand Name

Use these five criteria of good brand names:

1. Easy — A good brand name is easy to pronounce, understand, and spell
2. Appeal — A good brand name should be relevant and compelling to its target audience.
3. Position — A good name helps to position your brand.
4. Differentiate — A good name should differentiate your brand from competitors.
5. Adaptable — A good brand name works in different applications.

• Read the full post here:  How to Select a Good Brand Name
• Download the infographic here:  How to Select a Good Brand Name

How to Do Public Relations

Here are 10 tips for perfecting your PR.:

1. Remember journalists are a bit narcissistic.
2. Respect that no two journalists are alike.
3. Learn their communications preferences.
4. Be social media savvy.
5. Create assets that can be repurposed.
6. Write for your audience.
7. Know your competition as well as you know your own brand.
8. Prepare for and embrace bad press.
9. Don’t hound.
10. Think out-of-the box.

• Read the full post here:  Perfect Your Public Relations
• Download the infographic here:  Ten Tips to Perfect Your Public Relations

How to Make a Great Logo

Five guidelines for creating a strong logo:

1. Simplicity — Simpler is better.
2. Versatility — Your logo needs to work in a range of applications.
3. Consistency — Consistent use will make or break a logo.
4. Fresh-ness — Keep your logo relevant and interesting by refreshing it from time to time.
5. Restraint — Don’t overuse your logo.

• Read the full post here:  Turn Your Logo into an Icon
• Download the infographic here:  The Signs of a Great Logo

How to Do Local-Store Marketing

There are three primary elements of a good local-store marketing program:

1. Partnerships. Relationships with community partners build your credibility and your exposure.
2. Public relations. Use local media to get “free advertising.”
3. Personal selling. Putting a face on your business makes your brand more likeable and trustworthy.

• Read the full post here:  Three Local Marketing Strategies That Work
• Download the infographic here:  The 3 P’s of Local-Store Marketing

The post marketing how to appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

Brands have evolved from mere symbols of product quality and identifiers to aid customers in purchase selections.  They are bundles of values and attributes that define the way companies behave and the value they deliver to customers.  In layman’s terms, a brand is what you do and how you do it.  This means brands represent more than products or services — they convey value through their personalities, their communications, and their ideas.  And as such, brands should take a stand.

Have a point of view.

Taking a stand means having a point of view — on a political issue, a social cause, a cultural trend, even a news item.  In a terrific Knowledge@Wharton piece, Eric Solomon, Brand Strategy Director at Google, writes, “Having a dedicated point of view is something that defines some of the world’s most iconic, successful brands. This is a big part of what helps a brand differentiate itself from competition, and what helps to fill the gap between the products companies make and the emotional experience a brand idea can convey.”  He cites as examples Cheerios’s portrayal of multi-racial families in its advertising and Always’s “Like a Girl” campaign.

In The Gazette, Nick Westergaard writes about CVS removing tobacco from its stores so it could fulfill its mission authentically and about Thinx, a brand of period-proof underwear that “regularly shares updates on women’s’ health issues and feminism in their email newsletter.”  Nick says, “Consumers today aren’t just looking for brands to purchase from…They’re looking for communities to be a part of.”

Eric explains that “People expect companies to have a point of view on current cultural or political issues. According to a 2014 study, around 75% of millennials believe that businesses should share a point of view about issues and should influence others to get involved in an issue.” I would guess that older people might not expect companies to do so, but appreciate the effects.  In commoditized categories where products seem very similar and when many brands seem only to be hocking deals and steals, a brand that stakes a claim on something more meaningful is more salient and memorable.

Don’t grandstand or bystand.

Some brands grandstand.  They speak out on a hot issue or engage in newsjacking in an attempt to draw attention to themselves.  Commenting on Eric’s piece, Ben Allen, President at Labrador Agency, observed that some companies work “to amplify the budget and show earned media through controversy rather than being reflective of what the brand is and what it can rightly own.”  Some of the brands that have taken action to support or protest Trump-related issues seem to fall into this category.

Other brands just bystand. They let relevant issues and opportunities pass them by because they’re “too busy” or they stay quiet for fear of offending people.  Restaurants that don’t speak out about immigration policy, football sponsors that don’t address player’s domestic violence and health risks, technology companies that don’t acknowledge gender issues in their industry, global corporations that don’t advocate for better living conditions in the countries they do business in — these are just a few of the opportunities that are missed when brands are too inwardly focused or lack the courage to stand up for what’s right.

Of course, you have to allocate your resources wisely and some companies might not have the budget or the bandwidth to do more than simply run the business, but taking stand doesn’t necessarily involve additional work or investment.  Sometimes it’s simply a matter of redirecting what you’re already doing — communicating with customers, posting in social media, engaging your employees and other stakeholders, etc.  Instead of selling stuff, seek to engage people.  Instead of promoting your products, share your values.  Instead of trying to be trendy, do something meaningful.  Taking a stand just requires being thoughtful, purposeful, and responsible.

Take a stand.

Brands should stand. Stand for something, that is — and stand for it clearly.Click To Tweet

Stand for something, that is — and stand for it clearly.

If you’ve seen me speak, you know that I usually end my talks by sharing with people that business is personal to me.  I mean that I believe in business to make a positive impact in people’s lives — and I believe it’s businesspeople who can change the world for the better.  Business leaders have a tremendous opportunity — I would go so far as to say they have a responsibility — to make a substantive, valuable difference in this world.  They can fulfill it by ensuring their brands stand for something important and by designing and running their businesses in ways that express, reinforce,  and advance that point of view.

For some companies, that may mean simply communicating with customers in a way that conveys their common humanity.  For others, it could be a different way of engaging on social media, choosing business partners, treating employees, developing products, providing services, or otherwise creating value.  And for some, making a positive impact means running a high profile program to advocate for cultural, social, political, or economic change.  Whatever it is, business leaders should seek to make a real difference in this world — and brands should take a stand.

(With this post, I’m taking a stand and I can’t wait to hear your reactions — comments are open!)

related:

great brands never have to “give back”

John Gerzema on how to connect with today’s consumer

sustainability: what’s a brand got to do with it?

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Designers solve problems and bring beauty to the world. At TEDNYC Design Lab, a night of talks at TED HQ in New York City hosted by design curator Chee Pearlman with content producer Cloe Shasha, six speakers pulled back the curtain to reveal the hard work and creative process behind great design. Speakers covered a range of topics, including the numbing monotony of modern cities (and how to break it), the power of a single image to tell a story and the challenge of building a sacred space in a secular age.

First up was Pulitzer-winning music and architecture critic Justin Davidson.

The touchable city. Shiny buildings are an invasive species, says Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Justin Davidson. In recent years, cities have become smooth, bright and reflective, as new downtowns sprout clusters of tall buildings that are almost always made of steel and glass. While glass can be beautiful (and easily transported, installed and replaced), the rejection of wood, sandstone, terra cotta, copper and marble as building materials has led to the simplification and impoverishment of the architecture in cities — as if we wanted to reduce all of the world’s cuisines to the blandness of airline food. “The need for shelter is bound up with the human desire for beauty,” Davidson says. “A city’s surfaces affect the way we live in it.” Buildings create the spaces around them; ravishing public places such as the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, Spain, and the 17th-century Place des Vosges in Paris draw people in and make life look like an opera set, while glass towers push people away. Davidson warns of the dangers of this global trend: “When a city defaults to glass as it grows, it becomes a hall of mirrors: uneasy, disquiet and cold.” By offering a series of contemporary examples, Davidson call for “an urban architecture that honors the full range of urban experience.”

“The main thing we need right now is a good cartoon,” says Françoise Mouly. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

The power of an image to capture a moment. The first cover of The New Yorker depicted a dandy looking at a butterfly through a monocle. Now referred to as “Eustace Tilley,” this iconic image was a tongue-in-cheek response to the stuffy aristocrats of the Jazz Age. When Françoise Mouly joined the magazine as art editor in 1993, she sought to restore the same spirit of humor to a magazine that had grown staid. In doing so, Mouly looked back into how The New Yorker covers reflected moments in history, finding that covers from the Great Depression revealed what made people laugh in times of hardship. For every anniversary edition of The New Yorker, a new version of the Eustace Tilley appears on the cover. This year, we see Vladimir Putin as the monocled Eustace Tilley peering at his butterfly, Donald Trump. For Mouly, “Free press is essential to our democracy. Artists can capture what is going on — with just ink and watercolor, they can capture and enter into a cultural dialogue, putting artists at the center of culture.”

Sinéad Burke shared insights into a world that many designers don’t see, challenging the idea that design is only a tool to create function and beauty. “Design can inflict vulnerability on a group whose needs aren’t considered,” she says. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

What is accessible design? “Design inhibits my independence and autonomy,” says educator and fashion blogger Sinéad Burke, who was born with achondroplasia (which translates as “without cartilage formation”) the most common form of dwarfism. At 105 centimeters (or 3 feet 5 inches) tall, Burke is acutely aware of details that are practically invisible to the rest of us — like the height of the lock in a bathroom stall or the range of available shoe sizes. So-called “accessible spaces” like bathrooms for people in wheelchairs are barely any better. In a stellar talk, Burke offers us a new perspective on the physical world we live in and asks us to consider the limits and biases of accessible design.

The beat of the Book Tree. Sofi Tukker brought the audience to their feet with hits “Hey Lion” and “Awoo,” featuring Betta Lemme. For the New York City–based duo, physical performance is a crucial element of their onstage presence, demonstrated through the use of a unique standing instrument they designed call “Book Tree,” made from actual books attached to a sampler — with each percussion comes a beat. Their debut album, Soft Animals, was released in July 2016, and their single “Drinkee” was nominated for Best Dance Recording at the 2017 Grammys.

Finding ourselves in data. Giorgia Lupi was 13 when Silvio Berlusconi shocked many in Italy by becoming prime minister in 1994. Why was that election result so surprising, she wondered? And as she learned, it’s because of incomplete data that had been gathered during the campaign. The available data was simply too limited and imprecise, too skewed to give any real picture of what was going on. In the aftermath of America’s 2016 election, where most data analysts predicted the wrong outcome, Lupi, the co-founder of data firm Accurat, suggests that such events highlight larger problems behind data’s representation. When we focus on creating powerful headlines and simple messages, we often lose the point completely, forgetting that data alone cannot represent reality; that beneath these numbers, human stories transform the abstract and the uncountable into something that can be seen, felt and directly reconnected to our lives and to our behaviors. What we need, she says, is data humanism. “To make data [sets] faithfully representative of our human nature, and to make sure they won’t mislead us anymore, we need to start designing new ways to include empathy, imperfection and human qualities in how we collect, process, analyze and display them.”

Siamak Hariri describes his project, the Bahá’í Temple of South America in Santiago: “A prayer answered, open in all directions, capturing the blue light of dawn, the tent-like white light of day, the gold light of the afternoon, and at night, the reversal … catching the light in all kinds of mysterious ways.” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Can you design a sacred experience? Starting in 2006, architect Siamak Hariri attempted to do just that when he began his work on the Bahá’í Temple of South America in Santiago, Chile. He describes how he designed for a feeling that is at once essential and ineffable by focusing on illumination and creating a structure that captures the movement of light across the day. Hariri journeys from the quarries of Portugal, where his team found the precious stone to line the inside of the building like the silk of a jacket, to the temple’s splendid opening ceremony for an architectural experience unlike any other.

In the final talk of the night, Michael Bierut told a story of consequences, both intended and unintended. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Unintended consequences are often the best consequences. A few years ago, designer Michael Bierut was tapped by the Robin Hood Foundation to design a logo for a project to improve libraries in New York City public schools. Beruit is a legendary designer and critic — recent projects include rebranding the MIT Media Lab, reimagining the Saks Fifth Avenue logo and creating the logo for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. So after some iterating, he came upon a simple idea: replacing the “i” in “library” with an exclamation point: L!BRARY, or The L!BRARY Initiative. His work on the project wasn’t over. One of the architects working on the libraries came to Bierut with a problem: the space between the library shelves, which had to be low to be accessible for kids, and the ceilings, which are often very high in the older school buildings, were calling out for design attention. After tapping his wife, a photographer, to fill in this space with a mural of beautiful portraits of schoolchildren, other schools took notice and wanted art of their own. Bierut brought in other illustrators, painters and artists to fill in the spaces with one-of-a-kind murals and art installations. As the new libraries opened, Bierut had a chance to visit them and the librarians who worked there, where he discovered the unintended consequences of his work. Far from designing only a logo, Bierut’s involvement in this project snowballed into a quest to bring energy, learning, art and graphics into these school libraries, where librarians dedicate themselves to excite new generations of readers and thinkers.