excerpts from Jim Stengel's book, Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies, to show how to use your brand platform as a management tool to fuel, align, and guide every task you undertake.

1. brand-as-business
bits
from
Grow
denise lee yohn

2. Jim Stengel‟s book Grow: How Ideals Power Growth
and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies presents
brand-building through the lens of ideals.
Your brand ideal, Stengel says:
• transforms the enterprise into • generates effective new
a customer-understanding business models, strategies,
machine. and tactics before the
• helps crystallize your current ones have lost their
business‟s existing and freshness and begun to
potential points of parity and produce diminishing returns.
points of difference with the • enables leaders to drive
competition. results by being absolutely
• illuminates your clear and compelling about
organizational culture‟s what they value.
strengths and weaknesses.

3. This is very much in line with
the benefits of the
brand-as-business TM
management approach –
that is, use your brand
platform as a management
tool to fuel, align, and guide
every task you undertake.
So here are some of the best
brand-as-business bits from
Grow.

4. A brand is what a business is all about
in the hearts and minds of the people
most important to its future.

5. A brand defines who you are and
what you stand for as a business to
everyone the business touches, from
employees to end consumers.

6. John Kennedy, IBM‟s vice president for corporate
marketing, said, “The enduring idea that is the essence of IBM
has meant different things at different points in our history. At
one point, that meant automating the office. At another
point, it meant helping put a man on the moon in the Apollo
space program. Today it means all the systems that keep the
world working in health care, transportation, the power
grid, the infrastructures within industries.
We have to talk with many audiences about these
things, and what „building a smarter planet‟ does is it enables
us to engage all these audiences at the level of deeply held
beliefs about the world. The conversations we have with our
customers, for example, they start with a shared way of
looking at the world, a common belief in how technology
can improve the world.”

7. Remember, if you‟re in business,
you‟re in the relationship business.
You‟re in the business of forging
enduring bonds with the people who
are most important to your future.

8. Method‟s founders:
If Method was going to grow, it had to
brand itself from the inside out -- to
“market ourselves as ourselves.”

9. HP executive:
“Under founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, people
internalized the HP values and culture so deeply that they
became the connective tissue that made HP what it was.
Everybody knew that HP was about making great
technology that made a contribution to society.
But that connective tissue was weakened through the
tremendous growth by acquisition. And it was not being
strengthened because it was no longer in the dialogue and
the explicit values of the leadership. That this was missing was
really a problem for HP people.”

10. Clark Bunting,
President of Discovery Studios:
Great brands say no.
Jim Stengel:
Let me put that in broader terms.
Great businesses make
great choices.

11. Bernard Arnault, CEO and chairman
LVMH has said:
“Star brands only stem from an artistic
and creative mind,”
and he insists that every one of
LVMH‟s businesses must have an
operator and an artist.

12. Never cede the leading edge of your
category. You always need to be
planting seeds for new business, and
they‟ve got to be the right seeds…
The better you understand how your
ideal connects with people‟s
fundamental values and
aspirations, the better sense you have
of where to take the business next.

13. Brand experience and innovation
go hand in hand.
An imperfect world and a desirable
brand experience that keeps
changing -- that combination
creates a mandate for leaders to
maintain a twin focus on
execution and innovation.

14. Each product innovation must also be
an expression of the initial brand.

15. The more you strive to improve
people‟s lives and the more you
demonstrate that in your products
and services and all your
interactions, the more customers
and end consumers will reward you
by becoming loyal advocates for
your business.

16. Nothing is more symbolic than
changing what a company
evaluates; it goes to the core values
of the company and its leadership. It
shapes strategy making and governs
who advances within the company.

17. Elizabeth Buse, Visa group president:
“You have to perform, the business
results have to be there. But what you
do is only half of the evaluation; the
other half is how you do it.
We manage the what and the how
equally. Because if you have the what
and you don‟t have the how, then the
what will dry up over time.”

18. The so-called “soft stuff”
is really the “hard stuff.”
Nothing is harder to get right than a
culture change, and nothing pays
such huge dividends.

19. In 1980 virtually the entire market
capitalization of the S&P 500 companies
consisted of tangible assets (cash, offices,
plants, equipment, inventories, etc.)
By 2010 tangible assets accounted for only
40-45% of the S&P 500 companies‟ market
capitalization. The rest of their
capitalization consisted of intangible assets,
and about half of that -- more than 30% of
total market capitalization -- came from
brand.
source: Millward Brown Optimor

20. The organizational work in bringing a
brand ideal to life is never really done.

21. get the book: Grow
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