the flywheel for brand building

The discipline of reality-recognition is the discipline of propriety, and sommeliers have perfected this discipline.

If you want to create value and sustain value in a world of consensus collapse, there are three strategies toward cultivating propriety: 1. build a discipline around knowing what’s real by blending your senses , 2. give matters their... See more

So what’s an organization to do? Either chase what’s hot indefinitely until burnout, or nobly reject growth and sustained relevance on a doomed quest for authenticity?

There’s a secret third posture:

Propriety

.

At its core, this is already how transformative corporate brand work gets done. The most successful brand transformations aren’t solo CMO projects; they’re upstream CEO-CMO partnerships. The CEO brings the business strategy, ambition, risk tolerance, and commensurate authority over innovation resources. The CMO brings customer intelligence,... See more

3. Different Approaches, Different Advantages

If Sharp’s theories were truly universal as he posits, every company would pursue the Diageo approach to brand strategy. They don’t, because different relationships between what brands stand for and the innovation they undertake reveal distinctly different advantages to exploit.

Diageo brands stand for... See more

In other words, brand can be thought of as the capstone atop McGrath's framework—an unnamed source of stability, coherence, and discipline. The virtuous cycle, or flywheel effect, this addition creates is why it’s the capstone. Brand brings coherence to innovation; innovation brings essential new vitality to the brand.

McGrath’s theory of transient competitive advantage begins with a fundamentally different assumption of reality from Sharp's: In dynamic markets, sustainable advantages have been replaced by temporary ones. Success requires managing a portfolio of advantages across different lifecycle stages—emerging through experimentation, strengthening through... See more

Ordinary life has come to give us a narrow set of permissions, usually limited to work and consumption. But potency lives in the delta between what’s normally allowed and what suddenly becomes possible in a special space.

As founders, community leaders, and shapers of these new cultures, this is the most important question we have to ask. Because we’ve seen that we’re not only creating culture: we’re producing personality in people. In other words, we’re creating types of guys.

I keep asking people to get more specific about the culture they’d like to see. What do you think it would be good if there was more of? What do you wish people were spending more of their time on? Instead of building a culture-agnostic platform, can you find a way to support that? To encourage that?