LOUNGER FEATURE
“ It ’ s a lot easier to change what you say about yourself than to change yourself ,” says Denise Lee Yohn . “ Clients will come to me needing a branding strategy — they are looking for a new tagline or a new way of talking about what they do , but what they really need to do is change the way they do business themselves .” Yohn says oftentimes when companies identify that they have a brand problem , they only think externally about how they are positioned or how they are talking to their customers , but they are not thinking about how or if they are engaging their employees . In other words , to make a good brand great she says the shift needs to happen internally .
Yohn , whose independent consulting business is based in San Diego , has more than 25 years ’ experience working in senior-level positions with companies like Frito-Lay , Oakley , and Sony Electronics Inc . helping them “ to unleash their valuecreating potential , improve their profitability , develop superior stakeholder relationships , and create lasting name recognition .” Yohn ’ s cumulative experience of advertising , client-led marketing , and brand strategy plus in-depth research led her to discover seven branding-building principles that great brands take to form a cohesive and comprehensive management approach she calls brand-as-business . “ Great brands don ’ t separate what they do to build their brand from what they do to build their business .”
What is branding vs . brandbuilding ? DLY : I have a problem with the term branding because if you think about where branding came from , a time when people had cows and ranches , and to make sure no one would steal their cows ranch owners would take these sharp pointy things and sear their livestock so you knew who they belonged to . So for companies 100 or so years ago all they were doing was branding their companies by putting their name or their logo on their products so you knew who made them . But if you fast forward to today ’ s market environment , that is not an effective way to develop relationships with customers or even an effective way to get people ’ s attention any more .
Award-winning brand strategist Denise Lee Yohn is the author of two books including the 2014 bestseller What Great Brands Do : The Seven Brand-Building Principles That Separate the Best from the Rest , and Extraordinary Experiences : What Great Retail and Restaurant Brands Do . As an authority on building exceptional brands Denise also contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review , Forbes , and Entrepreneur magazines , and has been featured as an expert commentator on USA TODAY , Bloomberg Businessweek , and CNBC just to name a few .
www . deniseleeyohn . com
What companies need to do today is what I call brand-building . When I talk about what great brands do , I will not be talking about logos or advertising or even creative marketing programs . I will be talking about cultivating a brand-led culture inside your organization . So when I talk to clients about brand strategy I will be talking about aligning their core strategies and operations with
L O U N G E R M A G A Z I N E | 1 1