1. "From Bangkok to Beijing and Sydney to Singapore, Ted's advice rings true “Brand: It Ain't the Logo* should be required reading for anyone who sits
because the branding principles he so clearly articulates are universal. around the ‘big table’ and for anyone who seeks to influence their decisions.”
This makes Brand: It Ain’t the Logo a must-read for marketing success in Ken Wong
any hard-fought international arena." Associate Professor, Business and Marketing Strategy
Ron McEachern Queen’s School of Business
President, PepsiCo Asia
Brands are more important than ever to the survival of North American business. Our manufac-
Brand:
turing base continues to disappear, epitomized by the dismal Branding performance of icons like Ford,
Chrysler and GM. The thickening fog of hyper-messaging – the unprecedented amount of commercial
Brand: It Ain’t the Logo*
messages that flood media channels and the minds of target audiences – is making it increasingly diffi-
cult for Brands to attract and retain either customers or the best employees – the latter amidst our
worsening labor crisis.
Yet at this critical moment, “Brand” is widely misunderstood. Egged on by business schools and the
ad industry, a wide swath of senior executives at companies from startup to Fortune 500 equate their
Brand with their logo or advertising tactics. These executives believe, therefore, that the Brand isn't
their responsibility – but that of the marketing department alone.
It Ain’t the Logo*
With passion, irreverence and colorful stories drawn from his 37-year career, Ted Matthews vividly
illustrates that North American business leaders – if they want their Brands to flourish – must acknowl-
edge that A Brand is what people think of you™. And that all the time and money that marketers
spend on advertising is pointless if every employee isn't consistently doing what the ads say they will.
CEOs must appoint themselves CBOs – Chief Brand Officers – because they are the only people who can
protect the Brand from their own executives and ad agencies, and who can make delivering the Brand
everyone's responsibility. Only then can the Brand realize its full promise: to be the principle around
ted matthews
which the entire company is organized, to attract and retain the best employees, and to enjoy the
greater strategic effectiveness and huge cost savings that come with consistently on-Brand behavior.
ted matthews persuaded adidas to bring back The Three Stripes. He convinced
Energizer not to kill the Bunny. But it’s still not about the logo. Over the course of a 37-year
career, he has preached proper Brand understanding and relentless consistency enroute to some of
the most successful Brand evolutions in North America – at companies including adidas, Steelcase,
Toshiba, Oxford Properties, Benjamin Moore, Steam Whistle Brewing, Kinross Gold and Honda.
Ted is Brand Coach and Founding Partner of Instinct Brand Equity Coaches.
*It’s what people think of you™
greg de koker is Brand Coach and Managing Partner at Instinct. Greg’s client list includes Bombardier Regional Aircraft,
The Beer Store, Canon, Macquarie Financial, Suzy Shier and CanWest Media.
andris pone is Brand Coach and Partner at Instinct. His client engage-
ments have included Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, KingSett Capital, Princess
Margaret Hospital Foundation and Warrillow & Co.
$25.00 US/CDN ted matthews
Brand Coaching with greg de koker and andris pone

2. Praise for
Brand: It Ain’t the Logo*
"Matthews and his team are champions of Brand actualization. They validate
the business rationale for emancipating Brand from the confines of market
fads, cyclical ad budgets and management whim. Thus, Brand is justly
positioned as a cornerstone in corporate strategy, organizational behavior
and leadership. The impact? The amorphous definition of Brand evolves
into a tangible, actionable set of behaviors for individuals throughout any
organization to embrace and strengthen, or dismiss and destroy, with their
every interaction."
Michael Boydell
Former Vice President, Yahoo!
"Marketing is going digital. Customers and prospects are interacting with
brands in ways we never anticipated. It is up close and personal…and there
is nowhere to hide. Understanding a brand’s equity, and delivering it consis-
tently on-line, is a whole new challenge for marketers. Failure is everywhere
– but Ted Matthews’ book is an excellent, easy-to-read roadmap to success
in this future."
Tony Miller
Former CEO MacLaren McCann and
Vice Chairman of McCann Worldgroup
“Ted Matthews has taken the mystery out of branding and, in so doing, has
given executives a powerful competitive weapon. Tomorrow I become the
Chief Brand Officer of my company!”
Real Bergevin
CEO, NuComm International
One of Canada's 50 Best Managed Companies™ for six consecutive years
Author, Call Centers for Dummies
“Brand: It Ain’t the Logo* contains a concise message that is delivered very
effectively. The lessons can be applied to companies in every industry. If you
have an emerging brand or an established one, you have to read this book.”
Jerry Patava
President & CEO, Great Gulf Group of Companies
“Brand: It Ain’t the Logo* is an enjoyable read with a host of clear rules and
colorful stories that will inspire CEOs and their CMOs to build great brands.”
John Bogert
Chief Marketing Officer, Coleman Natural Foods

3. Praise for
Brand: It Ain’t the Logo*
“This is a book about perspective and understanding. The kind of perspective
that marketers need – not just for themselves but for those with whom they
work every day and rely upon for support at planning time. Brand: It Ain't
the Logo* should be required reading for anyone who sits around the ‘big
table’ and for anyone who seeks to influence their decisions.”
Ken Wong
Associate Professor, Business and Marketing Strategy
Queen’s School of Business
“Ted Matthews wraps a persuasive argument in a lively read. This book is
packed with fascinating examples that back up its clear-sighted analysis of
how to build your brand, and – just as important – how not to.
If you want highfalutin academic analysis, look elsewhere. But if you want
clear, convincing and actionable advice on how to build your brand, you've
come to the right place.”
Jim McElgunn
Senior Editor, PROFIT Magazine
“Ted gives us pause for thought that branding should become a corporate metric.
If companies were to directly correlate the billions of dollars they spend on
brand-building to their ROI, I suspect they would discover it to be negative –
because they fail to grasp that a brand, indeed, “is what people think of you.”
Neil Glasberg
President and CEO, Invis
Head of Mortgage Services, HSBC Financial
“Brand: It Ain’t The Logo* is a great read. I couldn’t put it down. Great stories
and great insights. I plan to lay it on our MBAs to help them in GettingItDone!”
Brendan Calder
Professor, GettingItDone
Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
“In Brand: It Ain’t The Logo*, Ted Matthews offers a simple, logical and
inspirational manual made especially compelling by his insistence that the
CEO must be the Chief Brand Officer.
As well as being a must-read for every CEO and their teams, this book is a
sales and marketing "bible" for every organization and I will definitely make
it a must-read in my company!”
Karen Kerswill
Vice President, Global and Multi-National Sales, HRG North America

4. Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Consistency, Management and Time 1
Chapter 2 What “Brand” Really Means 11
Chapter 3 Be Remark-able 17
Chapter 4 Own a Point of Difference 27
Chapter 5 A Brand's Worst (and Next Worst) Enemies 35
Chapter 6 Build a Foundation 47
Chapter 7 Be the CBO 57
Chapter 8 Marketers: Surrender Your Brand 65
Chapter 9 Listen to Your Stakeholders 71
Chapter 10 Evolution, Not Revolution 81
Chapter 11 Branding is a Process, Not an Event 87
Chapter 12 Every Touchpoint Matters 97
Chapter 13 Make the Story Live and Breathe 107
Chapter 14 Be the Corporate Mythographer 115
Chapter 15 Inspire the Team 123
Chapter 16 Stop Giving 131
Chapter 17 Mine the Equity 139
Chapter 18 Protect Your Brand 147
Chapter 19 Ride Your Brand Through the Storm 155
Chapter 20 Make Them Want You 163
Appendix A Endnotes 167
Appendix B Index of Brands 171
Appendix C Brand Foundation: Instinct Brand Equity Coaches 173

6. [1] Consistency, Management
and Time
It took me the better part of a 37-year
career in marketing communications
to convince myself that my definition
of Brand was the right one – and to
start convincing others.
“How the hell is a new logo going to turn
around our company?”
(Almost) An Instinct client

7. Brand: It Ain’t the Logo*
Sometimes I wish I'd done my career the other way around.
I spent the first 30 years of my working life running a marketing company,
Promanad Communications. I sold it 1998 and left two years later, and for
the past seven years, I've had a Brand Coaching practice here at Instinct.
I enjoyed the Promanad years immensely. However, we could have used
our resources – and our clients could have used theirs – much more effec-
tively.
If only we had all understood what a “Brand” truly was.
In 1971, after studying at the Ontario College of Art, I started up Promanad
with my father. Coming from a design background, I tended to think of
Brand the same way that my client CEOs and all the ad agencies did – as
mainly a matter of “creative,” the industry term that describes the ideas,
words and design behind marketing and advertising materials. In other
words, I believed, just like everybody else, that a Brand consisted mostly of
a logo and advertising.
Even so, I tried to convince my clients that all of their marketing and adver-
tising campaigns had to be built on a powerful communication device I
called a “core idea.” Core ideas, like the Marlboro Man, Nike's silhouette
of an airborne Michael Jordan or Subway's Jared (the guy who lost 200
pounds eating hoagies), express the essential truth of their Brands in ways
that are relevant and compelling to the target audience.
It's vital that core ideas can stand the test of time, because if you want to
keep your Brand in a customer's head, you had better first, tell them some-
thing real and essential about your Brand, and second, be consistent and
not change the message all the time. Otherwise, people won't know what
to think of your Brand from one day to the next.
The Challenge
Consistently communicate the core idea. For a variety of reasons, it was an
almost impossible discipline to drive through client organizations when
Promanad was growing in the 1970s and 80s. The main culprit was that,
ironically, the ad agencies were then at the height of their power. They
were in a position, quite the opposite of today, to easily deliver big sales
increases for their clients.
2 *It’s what people think of you™

8. [1] Consistency, Management and Time
Television typified how relatively straightforward it was. We lived in a uni-
verse of 13 channels, not 500 or a thousand. Because there were fewer
ways to distribute corporate messaging, and because the overall pace of life
was slower, customer attention wasn't nearly as fragmented as it is today.
Relatively focused customer attention meant that advertisers just ran their
spots to the huge audiences provided by the main networks, and the sales
came rolling in.
The Tyranny of New Ideas
If a given campaign didn't work as well as expected, it was no big deal.
Renewed success was as easy as the next new idea, creating a cavalier atti-
tude among the ad agencies and their clients – which was, in fact, one of
the main reasons that good campaigns failed in the first place. They
weren't given time to take root, because the ad agencies and their clients
were constantly rolling out new advertising with new core ideas – or with
no core ideas at all.
Consistency was almost impossible to drive
through client organizations.
Corporate Amnesia
Then there were the inevitable personnel changes that have always been a
part of doing business. Even if we did manage to focus the minds of a client
on communicating a consistent core idea, our contacts within the compa-
ny would eventually move on, and that company's commitment to work-
ing on consistent Brand communications went out the door with them.
There was simply no corporate memory.
The people who replaced them, quite naturally, came into their new jobs
with a burning desire to prove themselves. But people don't typically set out
to prove themselves by simply perpetuating the ideas of those who came
before them. These “New Friends” inside the Brand organization discard
the ideas of their predecessors – often, even if the ideas were working beau-
tifully – and insist on their own new program in a bid to make their mark.
3

9. Brand: It Ain’t the Logo*
And so the client would direct us to abandon the “old” ideas and work on
something new. We would grudgingly turn our backs on all the time that
was spent developing the old ideas, abandon any momentum that may
have been built up in the target audience, and start all over again.
Kill the Bunny?
Complicit with the Brand's New Friends were its “Old
Friends” – the people on the client side who were bored or
even hateful of the Brand message and were willing to do
something, anything, to change it. Eventually it happens in
every organization. I had Energizer batteries as a client for
several years and every year we'd have a meeting to work on
their strategy for selling through retail stores. Not a single
meeting went by without one of the Energizer execs pleading with me:
“Do we have to use that damn bunny again?”
Luckily we managed to convince them, year in and year out, to stick with
the bunny. But the Energizer folks were an exception when it came to
understanding the importance of consistency. They were able to suppress
their murderous urges because the bunny – a powerful core idea – was such
a runaway winner.
Formalizing the Brand (Part One)
Old Friends and New Friends kept our clients' Brand communications in a
constant state of flux. I wondered: how will stakeholders – employees, cus-
tomers, investors, suppliers, the media – know what to think of this Brand?
How are they supposed to figure out what the Brand is from one day to the
next?
That's when it hit me. How the customer views the Brand is in fact what
the Brand is. Nothing else matters. The company's execs and its market-
ing department, busily preparing their next brochure or ad campaign,
might think they know what the Brand is, but all they really know is what
they want the Brand to be at that moment. It is stakeholders, each and
every one of them, who get to decide what the Brand is.
In other words, A Brand is what people think of you™.
4 *It’s what people think of you™

10. [1] Consistency, Management and Time
Instinct
Somewhere along the line, I noticed that entrepreneurs, in contrast to man-
agers trained at business schools, seemed to instinctively understand this.
They “just knew” that their Brand wasn't their logo or their advertising.
They grasped that their Brand was the sum of every experience ever had,
by anyone, with their organization.
The name of our firm, Instinct Brand Equity Coaches, embraces the entre-
preneur's instinctive understanding of Brand. As they launch their enter-
prises, entrepreneurs can easily articulate the key elements of their Brand,
especially their core purpose, vision, mission, position and values. They
might not even think of these foundational elements in terms of “Brand” –
they might not even have a label for any of these thoughts – but they focus
tightly and relentlessly on them and ensure they are delivered to customers
with ruthless consistency, because they understand that failure to do so
means the end of their fledgling business.
The Brand Foundation
In a bid to protect client Brands from the whims of Old Friends and New
Friends, we at Instinct have adopted the entrepreneur's innate flair for
Branding – by articulating the key Brand elements in a Brand Foundation.
The Brand Foundation is created to survive the marketing manager, execu-
tive or CEO who replaces you and yes, your own boredom or impatience.
Managers
One of my key early assumptions was that the highly-paid, business school-
trained executives at client companies knew, by virtue of their education
and job position, what a Brand really was. These were the men and women
who were not pure entrepreneurs, who (through no fault of their own) had-
n't had to figure it all out for themselves to prevent their livelihood from
going up in smoke.
But eventually I realized that these professional managers thought a lot like
the ad agencies did. They thought the Brand was basically the logo and
the advertising. I would tell these managers that proper Brand discipline
could launch their company to new heights. But very recently, during the
5

11. Brand: It Ain’t the Logo*
writing of this book in fact, I met a top executive who asked: “How the hell
is a new logo going to turn around our company?”
Don't get me wrong: I like professional managers. Some of my best friends
are professional managers. It's not their fault that they've always equated
the Brand with the logo and the advertising. They think this way because
the business schools they went to, no matter how highly regarded, only
talked about Brand in marketing class.
Because they only learned about Brand in marketing class, they relegate
Brand management to their marketing department when they become
CEOs, and then they don't especially worry about it from that point onward.
Formalizing the Brand (Part Two)
They don't realize that because a Brand is what people think of you, it's
everything. It's every touchpoint that anyone ever has with your business.
And when the Brand is this important, it can't be delegated away, but must
be owned by the CEO – the only person in the organization with the clout
to make sure that employees are delivering the Brand at each and every
point of contact.
This Book – Why Now?
The core purpose of my firm is this:
To advance the sustainability of North American businesses, reinforcing our free
enterprise system and ensuring our continued prosperity as a society.
You might find this audacious. But it's exactly why I founded this firm. The
great majority of CEOs on this continent fundamentally misunderstand
what Brand is all about, and I'm passionate that proper Brand discipline is
the answer to three serious threats facing the prosperity of North Americans
right now.
The Decline of Manufacturing
First is the continuing deterioration of our manufacturing base, as epito-
mized by the depressing decline of the supposed “Big Three” U.S.
automakers. Think about the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost at Ford,
Chrysler and GM since the 1990s. The weak Brands of these companies
6 *It’s what people think of you™

12. [1] Consistency, Management and Time
have everything to do with their abysmal showing.
Ask just about anyone and they can easily tell you what differentiates BMW:
performance. Volvo: safety. Mini: fun. Ask those same people what Ford
stands for and their faces go blank. They're at a loss for a word.
In 2006, CEO Bill Ford announced plant closings, layoffs of up to 25% of
his company's workforce, and the need to build cheaper cars that people
want. That same week, BMW announced record sales and profits on their
premium-priced vehicles. Ford is so desperate for cash that it's actually
looking to sell its top division, Volvo – the maker of vehicles with one of the
world's strongest Brand positions.
Led by carmakers like Toyota and BMW, foreign car Brands have differenti-
ated themselves so clearly and consistently that in July 2007, for the first
time in history, the “Big Three” sold less than 50% of cars purchased in the
United States. Alot of foreign carmakers seriously understand Brand. We'd
better start understanding it too. If not to save our automotive industry –
which may well be impossible at this point – then to assert dominance in
the areas that China and the other economic superpowers-in-waiting
haven't already taken away.
Branding is not a matter of personal taste.
The Labor Market Crisis
For companies with an accurate understanding of Brand, a very promising
area of opportunity appears in the face of another threat to North American
business that companies are only recently waking up to: the looming labor
crisis that is already confronting organizations in many regions across the
continent.
By 2020, the number of Canadians over 65 will double. Add the shrinking
birthrate and there will be a smaller-than-ever cohort of young people
entering the working world to replace the old fogies. The graying of the
U.S. workforce isn't expected to have much impact until perhaps 2040, but
7

13. Brand: It Ain’t the Logo*
another dynamic is at work across North America now. It is our ongoing
transition to an information-based economy, and the increasingly high lev-
els of job mobility this shift gives to knowledge workers.
So it's only going to get tougher to find employees, and then to keep them.
This is all on top of the high costs of employee turnover in the here and
now. Even the very best companies lose 10% of their people each year, and
a super-strong Brand like Wal-Mart can experience annual turnover rates in
excess of 100% at some locations.
How can Branding help your organization stay competitive amid the wors-
ening market for labor? Simple. A strong, clearly communicated Brand
helps potential employees understand, buy-in to and stick with your com-
pany in a way that high salaries alone never could.
Hyper-messaging
The third threat we face is that of hyper-messaging – the overwhelming
number of commercial messages that bombard us each day. Because of the
increasing number of ways in which we receive media, and the ever-greater
number of tools we have to block out commercial appeals, it's only the
strongest, most disciplined Brands that break through to stakeholders.
More on this to come.
Consistency, Management and Time
Let's say that your favorite number is four. While sitting down with your
accountant to review the financials in your business plan, would you ask
that all the threes be changed to fours, just because you like them better?
When you're a Brand Coach, this type of thing is a regular request. It
reflects the lack of awareness that Branding is a rule-based discipline like
finance or accounting. So it's my job to tell clients that Branding is not a
matter of personal taste – that there are unbreakable rules. As you'll see in
this book, the unbreakable rules of Branding fall under three headings: con-
sistency, management and time.
Consistency, because constant changes to your messaging means that stake-
holders won't be able to figure out who you are – making it impossible for
you to get and keep their loyalty.
8 *It’s what people think of you™

14. [1] Consistency, Management and Time
Management, because if the CEO doesn't assume ultimate responsibility for
the all-important Brand, employees won't deliver it in every stakeholder
interaction.
Time, because if you want to earn and keep stakeholder mindshare over the
long term, Branding must be understood as a process, not as an overnight
event.
So start now!
9