Building a brand-driven business.

Do you like the?idea?of letting brand power your business but wonder what that looks like?

In the book The Brand-Driven CEO, David Kincaid shares a new way to see your organization to unlock this opportunity. It means leaving behind the traditional vertical view and thinking holistically in four areas.

These four areas provide focus, momentum, and make tough decisions easier. But it requires seeing your brand as more than logo and colors. It requires the CEO to own the responsibility for managing the brand for what it is—a powerful asset.

When you see your brand as “the value of a promise consistently kept” you can organize your entire company around that idea. This idea is the single, consistent factor among the world’s top performing organizations.

People

You can design the structure of your organization like everyone else but you’ll get similar results. Brand-driven CEOs begin with the core of the brand first. From there, they align everyone and everything to support the brand in the most effective way.

Your structure, roles and responsibilities, culture tracking and management, hiring, training, and compensation practices should all seek to increase the impact of your brand promise.

At the end of the day, your job as CEO is to make sure every employee understands and supports your brand’s strategy.

Processes

Every process—financial, operational, managerial—shapes how your organization delivers value. But, not every process is equally valuable. Brand-driven CEOs identify then manage and improve the processes that matter most.

It’s the processes that differentiate your company from everyone else deserve the most attention. Outside of the processes that make an outsized impact, “average is not only alright, it’s by design.” Effectiveness is more important that efficiency and doing things right is not as imperative as doing the right things.

Once key processes are identified, they become candidates for investment. Constant improvement and development can turn these key processes into highly valuable IP for your organization.

Intellectual Property

In today’s environment, your intangible assets, not the physical ones, deliver margin for your organization. Brand-driven CEOs use the organization’s specialized knowledge, strategically, to create distance between their competitors.

With intellectual property (once again) alignment with the brand promise is key. How can your customer lists, databases, proprietary processes, design, and operational expertise be used to differentiate and deliver your organization’s value? And on the flip side, what measures should you explore to protect your IP from challengers?

Partnerships

As our world speeds up, customers demand services that are impossible for one single organization to provide on its own. This is how partnerships have become a powerful source of revenue growth—they allow organizations to focus on doing what they do best and outsourcing the rest.

Brand-driven organizations think wisely about partnerships and use them to build awareness, deliver on their brand promise more effectively, or both.

In the past, competitors were avoided. Now, a demanding and rapidly changing world allows organizations to find allies with their fiercest competitors to meet customer demands through mutual beneficial partnerships. They key is (say it aloud with me) alignment with your brand promise and viewing partnerships as more than a financial transaction.

Think, and act, differently.

To unlock the value of your brand, it’s key to understand that brand is the most valuable asset on your balance sheet. As this understanding grows, there’s an opportunity to align your entire organization behind your brand and bring it’s full power to bear on the market.

Remember, leaders at great companies think differently than their peers. They see things differently. They challenge convention. They’re not afraid to break the mold.

And that's you.

Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help:

• Brand Strategy:?Build your brand holistically to create favorability with your target market.
• Brand Identity:?Confidently market, internally and externally, with a toolbox of visual and verbal assets that make your brand distinct.
• Brand Marketing:?Establish a distinct relationship with your current and future customers.