Blazing Trails to Brand Leadership
How come some brands are great, while others just manage to be good? Is there a trick up the sleeves of those great brands – a trick that good sustainable brands can adopt to become great household names?
The answer is yes.
Happily, the financial investment required to adopt this trick is modest. The biggest investment has nothing to do with your marketing budget, and everything to do with your readiness to change the way you manage and grow your brand.
The ironic fact is that the key tool to building a great brand is your competition, because your competition makes your brand stronger. As my dad used to say, if you want to get ahead of the leader, don’t follow his tracks in the snow. Too many brands have become obsessed with their competitors, shadowing and imitating their moves and becoming nothing more than ‘me2’ brands. Often practicalities necessitate this apparent uniformity. You’ll know that milk, water, cheese and countless other items come in similar packaging. These are groceries which, undifferentiated, offer the same benefits as each other. Price often motivates the purchase. And then, from time to time, a product stands out.
Remember Listerine? The mouthwash your grandparents probably used? With a history of over 100 years – first created in 1865 - Listerine is a product which has seen nothing but steady increases in its market share of the mouthwash category. Yet, that category has been diminishing and, with it , Listerine’s revenue has been steadily decreasing. As Listerine’s competitors faded away, so did Listerine’s fortune, even as the leader, in a shrinking product category. Then things turned around. The company shifted its focus to concentrate on how it was actually delivering oral care to its consumers. With a century of trade to reflect on, the brand’s consumers of 2008 are the products of cultures that would be unrecognizable to their 1870s counterparts.









