Brand Success: A Lesson in Economics That 80,000 Businesses Never Learned*

Reading Time: 3 minutes

* Per one report, during the Startup Awards, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) shared the statistic of approximately 80,000 business startups failing annually.

The Currency of Branding and Brand Success

“Is it necessary?” is a question often asked when managing and navigating brand success.

When innovating or challenging the status quo, it’s important to know there are two camps at work: those who manage “past results” and those who manage “future outcomes.”

Incomplete Questions.
Incomplete Answers.

Questions like “Isn’t this good enough?”, “Can’t we get along with just this much?” and “How high is ‘high enough’?” are endlessly debated.

But let’s look at WHO asks those questions when developing or refreshing a brand.

• Is it the founder with vision? No.
• Is it the CEO who has passion? No.
• Is it the one who wishes to leave their “ding in the universe”? No.

Who’s asking “How much is enough?”

It’s the bean counter. Those whose focus is on managing and controlling financial (and other existing) resources. That person is doing their job.

The Missing Words That Change Everything

So when anyone asks “Is it necessary?” — there is one thing you can do to make the conversation actually productive.

Add the few missing words (shown in bold italics below) that make the question useful:

“Is this (fill in the proposed action) necessary to achieve the level of impact, inspiration, and differentiation that will make anybody give a damn about what we’re doing and the value we bring?”

CFOs and accounting personnel manage what they know and see. Those are the resources and currency they manage.

This is different from what founders, entrepreneurs, or innovators “manage.” The currency they manage? The future (something they see as clearly as the balance sheet seen on the desks of accounting personnel).

Two such examples of leaders who use the future as their “currency” are Richard Branson and the late Steve Jobs.

Richard Branson stated, “Unless you dream, you’re not going to achieve anything,” and one of Steve Jobs’ favorite quotes was Wayne Gretsky’s, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Hence, the “balance sheets” between these two types are very different.

• Financial folks manage funds and the short term that they can calculate and see.
• Founders, dreamers, and innovators manage impact, enthusiasm, and the long term they can calculate and see. (Read this story on one Napa Valley dreamer, or this startup in Austin Texas, or these entrepreneurs in Jersey.)
  

People who are oriented like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson manage dreams and inspirations while turning items or services previously thought of as luxuries into must-haves that the public will clamor for. As a result, the “bean counters” eventually become very happy.

Two Kinds of Brands: Which One Are You?

There are two kinds of brands in the world: Reaction brands and Initiative brands.

• Initiative Brands break new ground and do things because of a healthy culture: an internal restless passion for finding better solutions.
• Reaction Brands simply follow someone else’s lead.

Want an example? The iPad vs. the original Surface tablet.

The iPad was an Initiative Brand, born out of a pursuit of a new experience and a passion for restless dissatisfaction with the status quo.

The Surface tablet? That was a reaction-product to “enter the tablet market” (like the ill-fated Zune before it which was Microsoft’s answer to the iPod, a lesson about product development they didn’t learn from.)

How to Lead in a World of Followers

You can’t lead with beans (aka cash). You can only lead with dreams that, managed well, turn into more beans than you can count.

In other words, dreams cause things to happen.

Yes, beans help keep the fire lit, but it’s dreams that cause the spark in the first place.

Want more fire? Stop chasing beans. Instead, feed the dream with action.

Start starting. Stop stopping.

And dream on.

How Does a Brand Do This? This Is How.

Remember: You always have something special. Your independence and autonomy to tell a story that is 100% yours.

If you have a startup, small business, or legacy brand that’s become less relevant, now is the time to take control of your brand success.

When you control your brand, you control the narrative. I explain that here:

Start making that move today. 

And if you need help, then make this move and reach out.