Brand Strategy

If properly designed, brands will promise relevant differentiated benefits to their target customers.

Carefully choosing the most powerful benefits will not only result in brand preference, but brand insistence. That is, the brand will be perceived to be the only viable solution for the customer’s need. Put another way, the customer will not pursue substitutes if the brand is not available. The brand establishes a consideration set of one.

It is no longer enough simply to have a product or service — that’s just game stakes — you have to have a YouTube (or other video) presence, pop-in store, TV show, video game, music downloads, memes, print content (book, zine, oversize, lookbook, catalog), a festival, Virtual Reality, an airplane — in addition to the website or APP, the outdoor, Influencers (if you have them), conferences, tshirts, posters, water bottles, CRM, social content and other effluvia.

As the Global CMO of McDonald’s from 2002 to 2005 I had to find a way to get our brand back to relevance. This is the strategy that got us there.

Brand strategists think about the future because it’s their job to figure out what their organization ought to be doing today that will most likely result in achieving desired business goals (sales, margin and profit) and brand positioning goals tomorrow.

Positive, innovative and new experiences form one of two aspects that makes surprise important to the brands that have become successful in this new digital era.