A great brand is
hard to find. "I walked through a hardware store last night and I
came across 50 brands I didn't know existed," says Scott Bedbury.
"They may be great products, but they're not great brands."
Bedbury should know -- he's already working on his second great
brand. As senior vice president of marketing at Starbucks Coffee
Co., Bedbury, 39, is responsible for growing the $700 million
Seattle-based company into a global brand. Since Bedbury joined
Starbucks in 1995, the company has been on a branding blitz:
beginning a relationship with United Airlines to serve Starbucks on
all United flights; joining with Redhook Ale Brewery Inc. to
introduce Double Black Stout, a malt beer flavored with coffee;
venturing with Pepsi-Cola Co. to market Starbucks's Frappuccino
drink in supermarkets; joining with Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream to
introduce six flavors of Starbucks Ice Cream; opening its first
retail stores in Tokyo and Singapore, with 10 more to follow in each
market; expanding the Starbucks stores to 1,100 outlets with 22,000
employees; and serving coffee to 4 million people each week.
Building the Starbucks brand, however, is deja vu for Bedbury:
his first great brand was Nike Inc. When he joined the Beaverton,
Oregon-based footwear and apparel company in 1987, Nike was a $750
million business; when he left seven years later, Nike was a $4
billion business. In between Bedbury directed Nike's worldwide
advertising efforts and broke the "Just Do It" branding campaign. "I
can honestly say that Nike left its imprint on me in ways I never
thought possible," Bedbury says, "largely because of the strength of
the Nike culture."
Whether the product is sneakers, coffee -- or a brand called You
-- building a great brand depends on knowing the right principles.
Fast Company asked Bedbury to identify his eight brand-building
principles.
1. A great brand is in it for the long haul.
For decades we had great brands based on solid value propositions
-- they'd established their worth in the consumer's mind. Then in
the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of companies sold out their brands. They
stopped building them and started harvesting them. They focused on
short-term economic returns, dressed up the bottom line, and
diminished their investment in longer-term brand-building programs.
As a result, there were a lot of products with very little
differentiation. All the consumers saw was who had the lowest price
-- which is not a profitable place for any brand to be.
Then came Marlboro Friday and the Marlboro Man fell off his
horse. Today brands are back stronger than ever. In an age of
accelerating product proliferation, enormous customer choice, and
growing clutter and clamor in the marketplace, a great brand is a
necessity, not a luxury. If you take a long-term approach, a great
brand can travel worldwide, transcend cultural barriers, speak to
multiple consumer segments simultaneously, create economies of
scale, and let you operate at the higher end of the positioning
spectrum -- where you can earn solid margins over the long term.
2. A great brand can be anything.
Some categories may lend themselves to branding better than
others, but anything is brandable. Nike, for example, is leveraging
the deep emotional connection that people have with sports and
fitness. With Starbucks, we see how coffee has woven itself into the
fabric of people's lives, and that's our opportunity for emotional
leverage. Almost any product offers an opportunity to create a frame
of mind that's unique. Almost any product can transcend the
boundaries of its narrow category.
Intel is a case study in branding. I doubt that most people who
own a computer know what Intel processors do, how they work, or why
they are superior to their competition in any substantive way. All
they know is that they want to own a computer with "Intel inside."
As a result, Andy Grove and his team sit today with a great product
and a powerful brand.
3. A great brand knows itself.
Anyone who wants to build a great brand first has to understand
who they are. You don't do this by getting a bunch of executive
schmucks in a room so they can reach some consensus on what they
think the brand means. Because whatever they come up with is
probably going to be inconsistent with the way most consumers
perceive the brand. The real starting point is to go out to
consumers and find out what they like or dislike about the brand and
what they associate as the very core of the brand concept.
Now that's a fairly conventional formula -- and it does have a
risk: if you follow that approach all the way, you'll end up with a
narrowly focused brand. To keep a brand alive over the long haul, to
keep it vital, you've got to do something new, something unexpected.
It has to be related to the brand's core position. But every once in
a while you have to strike out in a new direction, surprise the
consumer, add a new dimension to the brand, and reenergize it.
Of course, the other side of the coin is true as well: a great
brand that knows itself also uses that knowledge to decide what not
to do. At Starbucks, for instance, we were approached by a very
large company that wanted to partner with us to create a coffee
liquor. I'm sure Starbucks could go in and wreak havoc in that
category. But we didn't feel it was right for the brand now. We
didn't do a lot of research. We just reached inside and asked
ourselves, "Does this feel right?" It didn't. It wasn't true to who
we are right now.
4. A great brand invents or reinvents an entire category.
The common ground that you find among brands like Disney, Apple,
Nike, and Starbucks is that these companies made it an explicit goal
to be the protagonists for each of their entire categories. Disney
is the protagonist for fun family entertainment and family values.
Not Touchstone Pictures, but Disney. Apple wasn't just a protagonist
for the computer revolution. Apple was a protagonist for the
individual: anyone could be more productive, informed, and
contemporary.
From my experience at Nike, I can tell you that CEO Phil Knight
is the consummate protagonist for sports and the athlete. That's why
Nike transcends simply building shoes or making apparel. As the
protagonist for sports, Nike has an informed opinion on where sports
is going, how athletes think, how we think about athletes, and how
we each think about ourselves as we aim for a new personal best.
At Starbucks, our greatest opportunity is to become the
protagonist for all that is good about coffee. Go to Ethiopia and
you'll immediately understand that we've got a category that is 900
years old. But here in the United States, we're sitting on a
category that's been devoid of any real innovation for five decades.
A great brand raises the bar -- it adds a greater sense of
purpose to the experience, whether it's the challenge to do your
best in sports and fitness or the affirmation that the cup of coffee
you're drinking really matters.
5. A great brand taps into emotions.
It's everyone's goal to have their product be best-in-class. But
product innovation has become the ante you put up just to play the
game: it's table stakes.
The common ground among companies that have built great brands is
not just performance. They recognize that consumers live in an
emotional world. Emotions drive most, if not all, of our decisions.
Not many people sit around and discuss the benefits of encapsulated
gas in the mid-sole of a basketball shoe or the advantages of the
dynamic-fit system. They will talk about Michael Jordan's winning
shot against Utah the other night -- and they'll experience the
dreams and the aspirations and the awe that go with that
last-second, game-winning shot.
A brand reaches out with that kind of powerful connecting
experience. It's an emotional connection point that transcends the
product. And transcending the product is the brand.
6. A great brand is a story that's never completely told.
A brand is a metaphorical story that's evolving all the time.
This connects with something very deep -- a fundamental human
appreciation of mythology. People have always needed to make sense
of things at a higher level. We all want to think that we're a piece
of something bigger than ourselves. Companies that manifest that
sensibility in their employees and consumers invoke something very
powerful.
Look at Hewlett-Packard and the HP Way. That's a form of company
mythology. It gives employees a way to understand that they're part
of a larger mission. Every employee who comes to HP feels that he or
she is part of something that's alive. It's a company with a rich
history, a dynamic present, and a bright future.
Levi's has a story that goes all the way back to the Gold Rush.
They have photos of miners wearing their dungarees. And every time
you notice the rivets on a pair of their jeans, at some level it
reminds you of the Levi's story and the rich history of the product
and the company. Ralph Lauren is trying to create history. His
products all create a frame of mind and a persona. You go into his
stores and there are props and stage settings -- a saddle and rope.
He's not selling saddles. He's using the saddle to tell a story.
Stories create connections for people. Stories create the emotional
context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience.
7. A great brand has design consistency.
Look at what some of the fashion brands have built -- Ralph
Lauren and Calvin Klein, for example. They have a consistent look
and feel and a high level of design integrity. And it's not only
what they do in the design arena; it's what they don't do. They
refuse to follow any fashion trend that doesn't fit their vision.
And they're able to pull it off from one season to the next.
That's just as true for strong brands like Levi's or Gap or
Disney. Most of these companies have a very focused internal design
process. In the case of Nike, between its ad agency Wieden &
Kennedy and Nike Design shop, probably 98% of every creative thing
that could possibly be done is handled internally, from hang tags to
packaging to annual reports. Today Nike has about 350 designers
working for it -- more than any company in the country -- to make
sure it keeps close watch over the visual expression of the brand.
They're what I like to call "impassioned environmentalists" with
their brands. They don't let very many people touch them in the way
of design or positioning or communication -- verbal or non-verbal.
It's all done internally.
8. A great brand is relevant.
A lot of brands are trying to position themselves as "cool." More
often than not, brands that try to be cool fail. They're trying to
find a way to throw off the right cues -- they know the current
vernacular, they know the current music. But very quickly they find
themselves in trouble. It's dangerous if your only goal is to be
cool. There's not enough there to sustain a brand.
The larger idea is for a brand to be relevant. It meets what
people want, it performs the way people want it to. In the last
couple of decades there's been a lot of hype about brands. A lot of
propositions and promises were made and broken about how brands were
positioned, how they performed, what the company's real values were.
Consumers are looking for something that has lasting value. There's
a quest for quality, not quantity.
Alan M. Webber ( awebber@fastcompany.com ),
a founding editor of Fast Company, favors gold coast blend and
maple-oatmeal scones. Scott Bedbury is a Sumatra man ( hot or cold
).