Leverage the Brand Image for Profitability

Brands propel revenue. Indeed, in a commoditized world in which many products are increasingly converging on the same level of functional excellence, brands are a key means of differentiation. Over the years, the business value of brands has been verified empirically many times. For example, a McKinsey study revealed that the world's 40 strongest brands yielded almost twice the total return on investment to shareholders over 20 years as compared to a benchmark index.¹

A recent economics experiment is particularly revealing. The researchers partnered with an Indonesian bank to launch credit card offerings that varied randomly in their branding yet carried identical financial benefits.² Thus, this “true experiment” permitted a clean separation between the psychological and functional benefits of a new product. Specifically, the difference between the two branding treatment conditions centered on the presence or absence of “platinum” labeling. The result of the experiment was that the mere impact of brand was a 7% sales lift over the week of testing, an economically significant magnitude in that market.

Of note, this was the barest‐bones version of a “brand,” consisting only of name and visual design, leaving aside all those additional facets that could potentially feed into a more complex brand image. As such, this experiment constitutes an “existence proof” of the effect of rudimentary branding. Overall, the brand revenue lift is a function of investment in the complexity, meaning, and emotional resonance of the brand image. Great branding—such as that practiced by global leaders like Apple, Disney, and Mercedes—brings considerably greater revenue lift.

Brands are particularly effective tools for building margin as opposed to volume. Consider the example of a power strip, a rather pedestrian piece of everyday household equipment. The device allows you to extend the reach of power connections and to unify inputs at a specific point in the home. Sometimes, however, a power strip is not just a power strip but also a means of self‐expression. Let's take the example of a power strip with two electrical outlets and two USB outlets. At the time of writing, there is such a power strip branded by General Electric and priced at $19. This price point is standard across the category for this product specification.

But there is another power strip available today that is priced at $155. This power strip is branded by Shinola, a premium lifestyle brand founded in 2011. What would seem to be a simple, utilitarian product is tricked out in the latter case with stylistic elements that bring psychological value to the customer in the form of aesthetic self‐expression in interior design. The Shinola brand is built on a design language centering on heavy, high‐durability, mid‐century American industrial design. Compared to the General Electric product, the Shinola product demands that the company provide additional investment in stylistic design. And certainly there is the tradeoff of diminished volume; after all, how many people will pay eight times as much for an identical object? Yet, the margin benefit makes this brand‐based play worthwhile. But what is it that makes one brand more profitable than another? The answer, to which we turn next, centers on the creation of a meaningful and resonant brand image. In short, customers will pay more for things they love.

Ensure That the Brand Image Is Meaningful to Customers

The brand image resides in the minds of target customers. In other words, the brand image is a structure within human memory containing interconnected knowledge of and feelings about the brand. How does this psychological aspect matter to the financial outcomes of the business enterprise? Businesses must generate revenue, and the place of brand image within the overall business model is the immediate precursor to revenue. The brand image drives revenue in the sense that customers buy what they believe will provide the benefits they desire. The clearer and more meaningful the brand image, the greater the opportunity for profitability.

A firm's overall business objective, typically profit, guides the marketing strategy, which then guides the marketing tactics such as product design, pricing, and advertising. Brand image is the result of a successful set of tactical executions. As we will see in a subsequent section, it is essential to coordinate the marketing tactics to create a coherent brand image.

The brand image embodies functional aspects of the offering such as performance, reliability, and durability, but it is the psychological aspects involving emotional connection that potentially drive profitability to the greatest extent. A great brand image is one in which the customer's understanding of the psychological side of the value proposition is crystal clear. And customers are willing to pay more for products that are meaningful to them.

The example of Fender is instructive. Fender is a classic American brand within the general category of music (e.g., instruments, amplification, production, etc.). Fender was founded in 1946 on the basis of innovation in the electric guitar, which in those days was a novel form of musical instrument.³ The Fender Stratocaster was a breakthrough product that, beginning in the 1950s, occupied the imagination of several generations of “wannabe” musicians dazzled by the prowess of popular music entertainers. Fender's primary product innovation centered on music amplification by way of transforming stringed‐instrument vibration into electrical signals that could be modified in innumerable stylistic ways, carving new sonic identities for country, folk, jazz, and rock music. The Fender brand image today contains elements of youthfulness, Americana, nostalgia, premium quality, classic rock stars, emerging new stars, and a “can‐do” mindset of musicianship. Ask a musician today what they think of Fender, and they almost certainly will have an opinion!

How was the Fender brand image created? The answer is both simple and mysterious. It is simple in that coordination across tactical executions (product design, pricing, communication, distribution, etc.) yielded a coherent brand image. For example, product design reflected a mid‐century industrial aesthetic based on molded plastics and flamboyant colors, indirectly referencing product design in automobiles like Cadillac and home furnishings by Herman Miller. The Fender brand is mysterious in that, as the best brands do, it finds ways to connect to cultural developments that add nuance and resonance to the brand image.

Take, for example, the product name “Stratocaster.” When launched in the 1950s, this sub‐brand name leveraged the cultural meaning attached to the words “stratosphere”—indicating superb and reflecting the high‐tech emergence of commercial jet travel—and “broadcasting”—indicating the ability to communicate to a mass audience at a distance and leveraging the high‐tech emergence of television. In the 1960s, the Fender brand leaned into cultural developments in popular music, particularly the explosive expansion of the youth music‐buying market attracted by varied musicians including The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix, all of whom featured prominently as endorsers in Fender advertising.

The continued interplay between branding and popular culture helped to create an enduring and meaningful brand image for Fender. Fender is not simply a set of products for musicians; it is a set of ideas that embody an emotional connection between company and customer. The takeaway for leaders is the imperative to plan a brand image that is uniquely meaningful to target customers. One way to clarify how the brand is meaningful is to design the strategic focus around psychological value, an idea to which we turn next.

Design the Brand Image around Psychological Value

Brands are a way to create and communicate psychological value. Psychological value is defined as the intangible, emotional, and/or identity‐based benefits of the offering. A brand brings psychological value when the customer feels good about consuming the brand, sees a personal relationship—perhaps akin to a relationship with a loved one—with the brand, or thinks the brand shares facets of their own identity, preferences, and aspirations. These psychological benefits stand above and beyond the purely functional benefits afforded by a product. A BMW owner, for example, appreciates the status‐signaling aspect in addition to the performance characteristics associated with the brand.

Psychological benefits may center on any or all of three key sources of value: emotional, self‐expressive, and societal. Emotional value centers on the simple feeling of pleasure brought about by acquisition or consumption. Pleasure may take many forms, from excitement to contemplative calm, from awe to animal passion, from momentary joy to sustained life satisfaction. Products can certainly stimulate immediate emotion (as when biting into chocolate creates a brief rush of pleasure). However, great brands move to a higher level of emotionality, implying a longer‐lasting emotional state. Whereas the Magnum brand of chocolate evokes pleasure simply through the specific recipe that combines cocoa and sugar, the Fender brand creates excitement by way of its years of association with a deep roster of popular and often rebellious music artists who themselves played Fender instruments.

Self‐expressive value centers on how the customer thinks of their identity in terms of the brand.⁴ Sometimes this self‐expression is outwardly focused, such that customers broadcast something about themselves through brand usage (e.g., driving a Mercedes along a crowded strip, carrying an Hermès bag to the theater). At other times this self‐expression is inwardly focused and not intended for public consumption (e.g., using a trusted personal care brand like Cowshed in the privacy of one's own home).

Finally, societal value embraces benefits beyond oneself as an individual customer that connects to others and the wider culture. For example, the individual customer may not benefit functionally from Warby Parker brand's “buy a pair, give a pair” initiative but may well benefit from the psychological satisfaction of helping others who are less fortunate.

The Fender brand is instructive in the way the brand image constitutes multiple facets of psychological value. In terms of emotional value, there is the pure joy that comes from music creation, performance, and appreciation. For a budding musician, using a Fender instrument to create the first bursts of musicality is a profoundly joyous experience. In terms of self‐expressive value, Fender helps both new and seasoned musicians to express their deepest inner selves through musical performance. In terms of societal value, the Fender brand subsumes the Fender Play Foundation, a public charity dedicated to increasing access to music education.

Self‐expression is a particularly potent avenue for brands to deliver psychological value. Self‐expression embraces two fundamental motivations underlying identity: the need for uniqueness and the need for belonging. All people crave both uniqueness and belonging, but the relative craving for each varies considerably over time and across the life span.⁵ Moreover, uniqueness and belonging exist in a state of opposition. In other words, there is a trade‐off between the two. Being more unique means fitting in less with a group, whereas fitting in with a group means being less unique.

Because these motives are in opposition, brands cannot succeed by simultaneously appealing to both motives. Brands excel at delivering self‐expressive psychological benefits when they specialize in one or the other. For example, many fashion brands (especially niche brands) cater to highly individualized forms of self‐expression. Rhone (in the men's performance clothing category), for example, is tightly targeted toward delivering uniqueness because relatively few individuals will be aware of its functional capabilities in the athletic space. By contrast, nearly all sports teams specialize in belonging—that is, connecting to a group identity. The Chicago Cubs, a professional baseball team with a passionate fan base, caters to those who want to cheer in unison while wearing identical Cubs‐branded clothing.

The key takeaway for leaders is to design the brand strategy and tactics to create and communicate distinct and differentiated psychological value for customers. Delivering psychological value is essential for brands to bring profitability. In this section we have discussed ways to integrate the brand image as a basic, essential component of marketing strategy. Once a brand image has been designed and launched, it is essential to track it, a key topic that is the focus of the next section.

Quantify Brand Image along with Awareness and Attitude

There are three key psychological performance indicators: awareness, brand image, and attitude. These three metrics answer three distinct questions: whether, which, and how much. Awareness is the presence or absence of brand‐related information in customer memory. Fundamentally, awareness embodies attention and memory as the underlying psychological processes. Awareness answers the question of “whether” the brand's identity has been stored in customer memory.

Brand image is defined, as we have seen, as a set of mental associations between concepts in customer memory. Fundamentally, image embodies the organization of concepts. Image answers the question of “which” aspects of the company's intended positioning have indeed lodged successfully in customer memory. A brand may have been positioned on status, but if customers associate the brand with fun, then the wrong image has been formed—at least in terms of the brand strategy.

Finally, attitude reflects the overall liking the customer has for the brand. Fundamentally, attitude embodies evaluation and preference formation. Attitude is the preferred term among psychologists, but in practice many other terms are used that reflect this same basic meaning, such as affinity, sentiment, satisfaction, net promoter, and so on. Attitude answers the “how much” question in terms of quantifying the degree of liking versus disliking. One may be mildly appreciative of one brand while wildly passionate about another, and this variation in attitude is consequential for purchase, usage, and loyalty.

All three performance indicators—awareness, brand image, and attitude—reflect orthogonal psychological facets of brand health. Orthogonal means that knowing the state of one metric tells you nothing about another. For any brand health dashboard, awareness, brand image, and attitude are bedrock components upon which more nuanced metrics may be added. It is noteworthy that awareness is a more meaningful indicator for newer as opposed to more mature brands. As brands become successful or even reach the status of market leader, awareness hits a ceiling and then evinces only minimal variability. By contrast, brand image and attitude are highly informative performance indicators at all stages of the brand's lifetime.

Measure the Brand Image with Customer Testing

How is the brand image measured? Essentially, brand image is about concepts and characteristics, whatever they are, that are so memorable that they come immediately to mind to customers. Often termed “top‐of‐mind,” whatever becomes memorable is usually something that is meaningful, important, or frequently encountered. Characteristics can be pretty much anything, including product attributes (e.g., reliable), functional outcomes (e.g., clean dishes), and psychological benefits (e.g., status). The successful positioning of a brand centers on the articulation of a very small set of characteristics—or perhaps even just one—that the brand wishes to be known for.

United Airlines for many years used the advertising phrase “Fly the friendly skies.” Underlying this messaging was the strategic positioning of “friendly.” In other words, the brand wanted customers to associate United with friendly, such that the first thing that comes to mind upon thinking of United Airlines is “friendly.” The psychological approach to quantification of the brand image is survey based: The method is to prompt the customer to respond with characteristics that come immediately to mind after hearing the brand name. The mention of “friendly” is an “either–or” that can be aggregated across respondents with a simple frequency tabulation. The result can be summarized as the proportion of respondents who say “friendly” spontaneously after hearing “United Airlines.” If a company desires multiple characteristics to be associated with the brand, then this brand image quantification can yield a list of characteristics ranked by frequency of occurrence across survey respondents. A strong brand image is one in which those characteristics designated to be part of the positioning appear with greater frequency than any other characteristics named by respondents.

Of key value to the business leader wanting to monitor psychological performance indicators is that awareness, brand image, and attitude may be expressed as percentages, enabling intuitively easy benchmarking. The frequency of characteristics, for example, can be expressed as the percentage of customers in the target market who after being prompted by the brand name respond by naming the one or more key characteristic(s) specified in the brand positioning. In quantifying brand image by way of frequency, its distinction from the other two psychological metrics, awareness and attitude, becomes more apparent. Awareness is quantified by the proportion of respondents who can name the brand after being prompted by the category (unaided awareness) or who say that they recognize the brand after being shown it directly (aided awareness). Attitude is quantified along a liking‐versus‐disliking scale.

Awareness is readily conveyed as a percentage. Attitude may also be conveyed as a percentage if the subset of individuals whose brand ratings are moderately or strongly positive (vs. weakly positive, neutral, or negative) is taken as a proportion of all possible responses (i.e., a “top‐two box score”). These differences in quantification method reflect the conceptual differences among “whether,” “which,” and “how much” questions and answers. Newer methods, beyond old‐fashioned surveys, are available to track brand metrics, a topic to which we turn next.

Quantify the Brand Image in Real Time

In today's business environment, a brand's digital health dashboard must include, at a bare minimum, quantification of awareness, brand image, and attitude. The longstanding practice of quantifying brand image using customer survey methodology is now being supplanted by digital, real‐time quantification. Specifically, automatic analysis of online customer data can provide up‐to‐the‐minute performance indicators in the same way that sales and distribution data now provide real‐time snapshots of business dynamics. We may conceptualize online customer data in terms of three basic categories: search data, social data, and purchase data.

Search data result from customers’ online searches for product and service information. Social data results from customers’ text‐based comments posted to social media. Purchase data result from records of past purchases within the relevant category. Brand image may be estimated reliably only from social data,⁶ but not from search or purchase data. By contrast, both awareness and attitude may be extracted from all three: search, social, and purchase data.

Awareness is relatively simple, so the mere mention of a brand name during a search is a good proxy for awareness, as are the frequency of mentions in social media posts and past purchase data. Similarly, attitude may be roughly estimated from search data, based on the underlying assumption that people tend to search for things that they like or want, although there are rare exceptions to this assumption. Attitude may also be inferred from social data by way of an increasingly powerful technique called sentiment analysis. Finally, attitude may be inferred from purchase data because people typically buy things that they desire, but again there will be exceptions. Because the brand image is a more complex conceptualization of the link between brand and characteristics, it is less accurately estimated from search data. People may search for a brand or some characteristic such as a product feature or goal, but rarely both at the same time, making insight into brand image difficult. Similarly, brand image is difficult to infer from purchase data, for the reason that there is no source of information regarding concepts and characteristics relevant to the brand in purchase history.

To summarize, the opportunities for real‐time quantification of brand performance indicators continue to widen. Three kinds of customer‐relevant online data may inform performance indicators: search, social, and purchase data. Both awareness and attitude may be extracted from all three data sources, but brand image may only be inferred from social data and not search or purchase data. In the final sections, we turn to the question of managerial best practices for building a coherent brand image.

Coordinate Tactics to Sharpen the Brand Image

Each and every tactical execution contributes to the brand image. Let's begin with product and service design. Product design is increasingly seen as an opportunity for branding, as when a coherent design aesthetic is deployed over multiple offerings. Automobile brands such as Porsche and Tesla, for example, design their portfolio of automobiles such that there is a recognizable “brand DNA” that is consistently evident in each new model design. In the power tools category, the DeWalt brand uses the color yellow along with a specific form factor to create an integrated “family resemblance” across its vast range of hardware products. And emblematic of best practice in branded product design is Apple's simple, clean aesthetic that permeates all of its offerings.

A key tenet of “design thinking” is the integration of product design with brand design, such that new product development supports the brand, and the brand gives direction to new product development, creating a virtuous circle. Indeed, customers derive inherent value from seeing a family resemblance in branded assortments.⁷ Furthermore, a cohesive aesthetic design for a brand portfolio lends itself to comprehensive intellectual property protection under trade dress law.⁸

Service design feeds into brand image just as does product design. For example, Polaris is a branded airline service tier operated by United Airlines. Polaris embraces a blend of service components (pre‐flight lounge), hardware (custom‐designed seating), and co‐brand partners (e.g., Saks Fifth Avenue) that together contribute to its brand image of premium air travel. Clearly, decisions regarding both product and service have the power to deepen or weaken the brand image. When Polaris launched, the partnership with the Saks Fifth Avenue, a more established premium brand, was instrumental in building customer associations of “premium” with Polaris.

Price and incentives feed into the brand image. Price may often be set by rule of thumb or by quantitative estimation of demand. Yet because price influences the brand image, smart managers recognize the power of pricing as yet another brand‐building tool. All else being equal, a higher price signals greater quality and a lower price signals weaker quality. Thus, price information feeds into customers’ assumptions about functional aspects of quality, capability, and durability, as well as into psychological aspects such as status and prestige.

One may even specify the price image as a subset of the brand image, consisting of the mental associations and shorthand assumptions regarding price that are connected to a product, a category, or a multi‐category assortment.⁹ Price image may not always be accurate: Customers sometimes assume a brand involves higher or lower prices than is actually the case. For example, much to the chagrin of Whole Foods, for many years customers overestimated the average cost of its assortment of offerings. This effect hinges on the inability of any one customer to recall precisely all of the prices within a large assortment. Instead, customers rely on mental shortcuts to infer an aggregated price point.¹⁰

By a similar logic, incentives also feed into brand image. JC Penney is known for offering frequent price promotions, which help to create a brand image centering on affordability but also lower quality. By contrast, premium brands such as Canada Goose deliberately refrain from price promotions because they detract from associations of high quality. Thus, decisions regarding both price and incentives have the power to deepen or weaken the brand image.

Distribution likewise feeds into the brand image. Where you buy a brand says a lot about the brand. Of note, retailers carry their own brand image. The difference in image between Walmart and Nordstrom (i.e., lower vs. higher price and quality) may potentially become associated with each and every individual brand carried within these respective retailers. A budget brand does better to associate with Walmart than Nordstrom; a premium brand does better to associate with Nordstrom than Walmart. Indeed, a key objective for a new brand is to find a retailer that “fits” with its intended brand image, thus unlocking opportunities to build and deepen its brand image by borrowing from the retailer's image.

The opportunity to create branded stand‐alone retail is attractive in large part because the brand image may be more tightly controlled, as in Apple's deployment of branded stores in which the interior design reflects the Apple product design aesthetic of simple and clean. This insight has been executed effectively by automobile brands for decades. The look and feel of the Toyota versus Mercedes showroom, for example, go a long way toward inculcating the desired associations in customers’ minds. Automobile firms with multi‐brand portfolios may benefit from creating stand‐alone branded retail locations, as Hyundai has done with its premium Genesis brand.

Brand startups that began under a direct‐to‐consumer business model, such as Allbirds and Warby Parker, have now created branded brick‐and‐mortar stores, enabling them to further enhance their brand image. The direct‐to‐consumer approach was seen by Walmart as an opportunity for further brand‐building that could leverage its competency in retail execution, a key reason behind Walmart's acquisition of Bonobos. The growth opportunity for business leaders lies in omnichannel, which is the creation of centrally managed platforms that offer multiple points of distribution for branded offerings that share a consistent visual and emotional brand tonality.

Finally, communication feeds into the brand image. Although communication campaigns may have various objectives, from raising awareness of a new product launch to a new price promotion, it must be emphasized that all communication necessarily has an influence on the brand image. From simple slogans to elaborate visual imagery, the information contained in advertising has the power to deepen and enhance the brand image.

A good rule of thumb for marketers is to plan explicitly when and under what circumstances pure brand‐building communications will be deployed. Sometimes the timing is based on expediency: A lull in new product launches constitutes a window of opportunity for brand‐building ads. An example is the legendary BMW Films campaign in which short‐form (less than 15 minutes) big‐budget action films created by and starring A‐list Hollywood talent were distributed to potential BMW buyers.¹¹ Unlike the more routine advertising support for new product launches, the BMW Films campaign was an initiative centering purely on building brand image. The objective was to inject more adventure, romance, and excitement into the BMW brand to attract younger potential buyers.

Another case of “good timing” was Apple's objective to support new product extensions from home computing to consumer electronics (especially the iPod, its wildly successfully portable music player). In order to set the stage for this launch, Apple fielded the purely brand‐building “Think Different” ad campaign. Think Different consisted of video and print media that featured imagery of iconoclastic creative minds: Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Ghandi, Martha Graham, Pablo Picasso, and others. Each of these famous historical figures has their own unique reputation and notoriety. In short, each has a brand image. And each respective celebrity brand image could potentially become associated with the Apple brand image, thus creating an aggregate impression of innovation and game‐changing creativity. To use some traditional marketing parlance, the Apple brand image was “laddered up” to the more abstract level of game‐changing creativity, an image that paved the way for success in new product categories beyond mere home computing.

Communication feeds into the brand image regardless of whether the advertising emphasizes brand building. Every ad is an opportunity to build the brand image.

Invite Customer Input

Customers contribute enormously to the brand image, and leaders must work with customers as co‐creators to build a strong brand image. At the most basic level, seeing a branded offering being consumed by a customer is sufficient to create an association between the brand and that sort of customer. Seeing an affluent young adult holding a Starbucks coffee cup contributes to the Starbucks brand image of affluence. Seeing a vigorous young adult wearing Lululemon apparel contributes to the Lululemon brand image of vigor.

Ideally, leaders define their brand strategy around a particular sort of target customer, among whom sales and usage have been successfully stimulated. However, the advent of social media constitutes a monumental leap in the power of customers to project their individual voices to the wider culture. Customers drive the brand image as much as the company does. Customers may broadcast product reviews, share usage stories with friends, and post images of the brands and products that they love. Indeed, social media‐based brand communities have sprung up rapidly and contributed to the growth of newly created brands, sometimes with astounding speed. Smart leaders look for ways to connect with and leverage such communities. For example, Emily Weiss, founder of the Glossier brand of cosmetics and personal care products, first amassed an active online community with her blog called Into the Gloss, and only later converted it into a business venture.

Brands obviously benefit from customer feedback, enabling them to recognize and react to nascent crises before they reach the boiling point. Such was the case when the Capri Sun brand of fruit juice experienced minor mold growth in some packages. Online critique was immediate. But so was the receptivity of the brand team under parent company Kraft‐Heinz, which enacted both a short‐term solution (reaching out directly to affected customers) and long‐term solution (an engineering fix that precluded mold growth).

Nevertheless, the threat of brands being hijacked on social media by customers with different views of the brand than the company has cannot be underestimated. Fred Perry is an upscale British fashion brand with roots in tennis, yet the appropriation of its signature polo shirt as the uniform of the Proud Boys has tarnished its brand image with unwanted associations. The Proud Boys are notorious for their participation in the U.S. insurrection of January 6, 2021. The rapidity with which negative associations may form around a brand after it has been hijacked creates a new imperative for brand managers to monitor the cultural environment in real time. How best to defend the brand across a wide range of threats was explored in Kellogg professor Tim Calkins’ book Defending Your Brand.¹²

Activate the Brand Image by Harnessing Societal Shifts

How do you elevate the brand to the next level of revenue growth? More to the point, how do you activate the brand image so that it is even more meaningful to customers? The answer is to connect the brand to cultural moments—that is, to link mental associations about the brand to significant trends in society. Great brands got to where they are by recognizing cultural moments and connecting their brand authentically to unfolding events.

The Fender brand, which focused on country‐and‐western musicians in the 1950s, pivoted in the 1960s to targeting young, middle‐class “musicians‐to‐be” who had become fascinated by rock‐and‐roll. Fender leaned into this cultural shift with celebrity endorsements by the hottest young performers of the era. The Fender brand image soon became inextricably intertwined with the youthful, rebellious attitude of rock music.

Harley‐Davidson enjoyed a similar trajectory of cultural relevance. A major supplier of military vehicles to the U.S. government during World War II, the brand saw new life when post‐war surplus motorcycles were appropriated by returning American service personnel as objects of inexpensive customization and, hence, self‐expression. In the 1950s, “biker culture” exploded into popular culture as a means of rebellious self‐expression. Harley‐Davidson cemented its brand image by connecting to a counterculture, iconoclastic aesthetic. Harley‐Davidson became the brand for those who refuse to play by mainstream rules.

Nike built its brand image by connecting to the societal shift toward physical fitness in the 1980s. Prior to this time, jogging and cycling were the leisure activities of a very few. The rise of home video exercise instruction (featuring stars such as Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons, among others) raised the profile of fitness, and by the 1990s fitness had become mainstream. Nike's mantra, “If you have a body, you're an athlete,” exemplifies how Nike leaned into the cultural shift toward fitness.

In forging an internal company culture poised to lean into cultural movements, it is essential for managers to hire employees with highly tuned “social radars” that enable them to anticipate new trends. The brand team needs pop culture junkies. The good news is that it has never been easier to monitor new trends, which may be observed digitally by anyone with a laptop and a nose for the new.