“What Great Brands Do.” Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest

In her book “What Great Brands Do”, brand-building expert, Danise Yee Yohn outlines Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest. Her seven proven key principles are what the world’s top brands like Apple, Google, GE, Zappos, and Nike consistently live out, making them stand out in the world market.

These Seven Principles will show you exactly what you need to do if you want to build an outstanding brand. Here are the principles that separate the best from the rest:

Great brands start inside

This principle is about how great brands put first things first. They cultivate a vibrant corporate culture around their brand because they know their culture determines whether or not the brand is embraced by employees and other stakeholders and appropriately interpreted and reinforced with customers.  Examples:

• Starbucks demonstrates its values of dignity and respect by giving part-time employees health benefits, stock options, and free coffee.
• Basecamp practices what it preaches, encouraging employees to work remotely — and realizes significant productivity and engagement benefits when they do.
• Zappos delivers happiness to its employees first through its fun work environment and empowerment of (not control over) its service reps.

Great Brands Avoid Selling Products

You read that right.  Great brands actually avoid selling products.  Great brands know that people make purchase decisions based on how products make them feel or the identities products help them experience or express — so they seek to create emotional connections with people and use product features as a mere support for that emotional appeal. Examples:

• Nike doesn’t sell shoes as much as it inspires people.  Above all of Nike’s innovative technology, cool designs, and exciting celebrity endorsements, its brand success can be attributed to its consistent use of experiences and communications that inspire people to feel like athletes.
• Apple really isn’t selling gadgets. Yes, the company makes a fine gadget but Apple’s brand appeal is a combination of all the emotions those gadgets produce.
• American Express is selling more than credit cards.  It offers its customers a sense of status, significance, and privilege.

Great Brands Ignore Trends

While following a trend may be a great way to ensure your brand will be noticed and talked about at least in the short term, Great brands ignore trends.” Instead, what do they do? They either create the trends themselves or challenge the existing trends. In other words, they don’t go with the flow. A better way to define them is that they’re endothermic. They use their internal environment to influence their outer environment.

• Chipotle Mexican Grill got started by challenging the trend in the early ’90s in which fast-food chains were lowering prices. Chipotle offered higher quality ingredients, assembled right in front of customers, in a beautiful restaurant — at a higher price point — and ushered in the new fast-casual restaurant segment.
• Oprah ignored the trend started by Martha Stewart and other celebrities and decided against taking her production holdings public and licensing out her name for use on products — and has preserved and grown the value of her brand in the process.
• Southwest Airlines‘ founders didn’t follow the lead of other airlines whose hub-based route strategy, sophisticated rewards programs, and meal service all seemed to be producing great success and profitability at the time.  Those very tactics they eschewed are now blamed for the significant losses their competitors experienced.

Great brands don’t chase after customers

Great brands don’t chase after customers; they attract people to them. They understand that if you stand for something, some people will love you and some will hate you, but the ones that love you will buy your brand and be willing to pay a premium for it. Consumers find enormous appeal in brands that insistently convey their strongly forged identities like a lighthouse. When you embrace and celebrate who you are, you attract the people who are destined to be your most loyal, profitable customers.

Great Brands Sweat the Small Stuff

Great brands may think big, but they sweat the small stuff. They know that all the little things they do or fail to do in person shape brand perceptions far more than the big things they claim through mass media. So they design their customer experiences down to last detail and usually appeal to as many of the five human senses as possible. They know that those experiences are so much more impactful, distinctive, and memorable than any advertising or marketing program they could run.

The kind of flooring in your store, restaurant, attraction, trade show exhibit, etc. can make a big impression on your customers. Steve Jobs obsessed over the flooring in the Apple stores — insisting on replacing the light wood with a gray-blue sandstone imported from Italy, even though it cost 10 times more than an alternative that a more “reasonable” person would have accepted.

Sweating the small stuff means caring about details like flooring, as well as lighting, wayfinding signs, display materials, uniforms, smells in the bathroom, door handles, carry-out bags, receipts… Everything communicates about what you stand for. Therefore, every touch-point matters.

Great Brands Commit and Stay Committed

This principle is easy to understand but hard to execute. Great success comes from doing a few things and doing them really well. Great brands simplify their strategy and set priorities around their core values.  They then consistently execute on them and over time their customers learn exactly what the brand stands for hence building trust.  Examples:

• Amazon‘s CEO Jeff Bezos always asks his team to consider, “What ’s not going to change over the next 10 years?” His company’s long-standing commitment to the three things — the best selection, the lowest prices, and the cheapest and most convenient delivery — has informed decisions that have enabled it to thrive while so many other e-retailers come and go.
• Shake Shack, the New York-based burger and shake chain, turned down seemingly lucrative growth opportunities like catering in order to keep people coming to their locations and enjoying the entire Shake Shack brand experience.
• Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb has said, “The secret to our success is how we have managed our repeatable model to get better and better every year, while still adapting and adhering to the deep business principles that were set in place at the time of [founder] John Bogle.“
• The poster below shows the new look of Safaricom and should give more insights on this principle.

Great Brands Never Have to ‘Give Back’

The brand-building principles, Great Brands Never Have to ‘Give Back,’ may be the most surprising one. There’s nothing wrong with giving back.  In fact, it’s good to give back.  But the great brands seem to be asking themselves, “Why merely ‘do good’ when we can be great?!”  And they’ve been advancing a new movement in what is traditionally known as corporate social responsibility (CSR). Great brands are making positive social change without engaging in typical CSR activities. They’re redefining CSR as CSV: creating shared value, and using the power of their brands to inspire change and produce an overall beneficial impact on society.

Reference:  “What Great Brands Do”, By Brand-building expert, Danise Yee Yohn