8 Things that Great Brands Do: GBSH Brand Building How-To Guide

A great brand is hard to find. Your brain is hardwired to notice only what is different.  "They may be great products, but they're not great brands."

Whether the product is sneakers, coffee -- or a brand called You -- building a great brand depends on knowing the right principles. We asked GBSH top brand experts to identify their 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, they were approached by a very large company that wanted to partner with them to create coffee liquor. I'm sure Starbucks could go in and wreak havoc in that category. But they didn't feel it was right for the brand then. They didn't do a lot of research. They just reached inside and asked ourselves, "Does this feel right?" It didn't. It wasn't true to who we they were right then.

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 our experience with Nike, we can tell you that CEO Mark Parker 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, their greatest opportunity is to become the protagonist for all that is good about coffee. Go to Ethiopia and you'll immediately understand that they've got a category that is 900 years old. But in the United States, they'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 Lebron James's winning shot against the Warriors 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, Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton, 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 we 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.

GBSH Consult is a top global consulting firm that delivers essential advantage to the world's top influential businesses, governments, and organizations. It has gone ahead to build and advise some of the world’s strongest brands of all time. Follow us on twitter @gbshconsult.