From the course: Brand Leadership: Building Brand and Culture

Brand leadership: What does it take?

From the course: Brand Leadership: Building Brand and Culture

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Brand leadership: What does it take?

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- It's no surprise that everyone wants their brand to be the market leader. But how to achieve brand leadership today may be surprising. That's because the traditional means for producing brand leadership, marketing, has lost its effectiveness. Customers just don't trust marketing anymore. These days, people's opinions of brands are influenced less by traditional marketing efforts, and more by what other people say and what they experienced themselves. To overcome or compensate for the failure of marketing, I see companies resort to one of three courses of action. Some think that if they spend more money on marketing, their results will improve. But spending more on the same things that don't work is pretty much just throwing good money after bad. Others bank on new communications technologies, like augmented reality or new tactics like TikTok campaigns. And sometimes they get lucky and come across something that increases brand power. But most of the time, these tactics turn out to be good at only producing short-term bumps. And they're easily imitated or outdone by competitors. Still, others think that they just need more marketing data so they can make better marketing decisions. So they focus on research, and testing, and insights and analysis, but they end up producing an overwhelming amount of data that only leads to more complexity and confusion about what really works. None of these efforts to achieve brand leadership is effective because they're trying to solve the wrong problem. They're trying to improve marketing, and improving marketing is not the way to achieve brand leadership. That's because great marketing is no longer enough to build a great brand. Marketing still matters, but not nearly as much as it used to. Today, brand leaders are distinguished less by their marketing, what they say and promote, and more by the way they operate, what they do and deliver. So great brands start inside, inside the organization behind the brand. If you want to achieve brand leadership, you must start brand building by cultivating a culture that is inspired, aligned, and led from inside your organization.

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