FINAL WORDS OF ADVICE
So What Does It Take to Build a Great Brand?
You can create “bedazzled”: consumers who love you and tell your story.
This requires brand vision from conception to legacy.
Consumer brands are not created by genius alone.
There are no accidents when it comes to creating “cravers,” “apostles,” or “brand ambassadors.”
You get into a consumer’s head through a comprehensive understanding of users, usage, repurchase, and “raving.”
Your level of knowledge is comprehensive and anticipatory.
Demand spaces are the quantitative tool that allows you to dissect and respond to dissatisfactions.
Consumer complaints that are met with humility, apology, enthusiasm, engagement, and curiosity are a gift.
Say it loudly from across the berm.
Your frontline sales partner to your consumer needs to be vibrant, primed with knowledge, engaged in the moment, and compensated for the riches that he creates.
She shops with her eyes and her emotions. Help it all come to life for her; tell the story with images and with words that bite.
Apply the Golden Rule up, down, and around.
Innovation remains the game changer; leadership is inherently unstable.
Success breeds competition and destruction.
See around the corner; be ready for whatever is “next.”
We’ve told quite a few success stories in this book. We’ve described how, in his late twenties, Howard Schultz discovered and remade Starbucks. We’ve described how the 23-year-old Les Wexner bought sportswear and became the king of specialty retail. We’ve told the story of Tony Hsieh and his accidental investment in Zappos and ultimate appointment as CEO.
You can now recount the story of John Mackey as a “hippie” opening a healthy grocery store. Or the tale of Kip Tindell, who slaved away for two years to open his “container store”—where his friends joked that he was selling expensive boxes. Or the one about the wad of cashmere that Brunello Cucinelli knitted into sweaters that he sold to wealthy German consumers at a three-times markup.
None of these entrepreneurs had a master plan. They had the germ of an idea—what became their secret sauce. But the truth is, they won big-time because of their passion. That’s what you need if you are going to succeed, if you are going to create a brand that has an emotional connection with the consumer.
These entrepreneurs were:
Present in the moment and at the front of the battle line.
Learning every day.
Invested in continuous innovation (“small R, big D”).
Always worrying; always preparing; always ready for what was “next.”
Caring deeply about their followers—most considered them their “partners.”
Both fearless and fearful. They would jump to what was “next” without worrying about the business. They may have cowered in bed at night at the risks that they could enumerate—but they were willing to ignore them.
In their minds, there was a common thread: the consumer was the “boss.” She needed to be happy—and if she was happy, she would tell her friends. She could be influenced and persuaded, but the evidence had to be compelling. What she was buying had to give her pleasure. It had to take her to a new place. Brands were her touchpoint as an explanation and to save time.
By now, you know the Eight Brand Rules. It’s now your job to bring passion to your category. Invent something bigger, something bolder. Change the consumer frame. Whether you are a multibillion-dollar enterprise or a start-up, the rules are the same. You need to know more about your consumers and their consumption than anyone else. There really is a knowledge advantage. It starts with the data. It requires intuition and expertise. You need to get deep into the details of product creation to understand the true possibilities. You need to create a red thread that links all the logic points together.
The road map to getting started is a version of demand spaces (either the big macro study that we have described or a slimmed-down version based on your budget and your skill). You then need to call your team members together for a cross-functional response: design the great leaps forward together. Reinvention is not optional. To paraphrase Shakespeare writing about Henry V before the battle of Agincourt, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers [and sisters]” will be remembered from this day forward for our invention, the joy we created in our consumers, the words of reverence that we generated, and the legacy of our inspiration.