That’s an ambitious title, because if you read closely enough, it means that you need to have core values for yourself and for your business in the first place.

Core values are to the human side of things like making a profit are to the business — they’re the lifeblood and need both to be through through and planned to be there.

Strategies, brands, and cultures are developed on core values.

If you need an example, you can look no further than Zappos, which is essentially a value-driven customer service company that happens to sell shoes and other goods online. Their ten core values are not just a pretty wallet card, a make-feel good page on their web site.

1.    Deliver WOW Through Service
2.    Embrace and Drive Change
3.    Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4.    Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5.    Pursue Growth and Learning
6.    Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7.    Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8.    Do More With Less
9.    Be Passionate and Determined
10.  Be Humble

When the company made a mistake in its pricing on a sister site, it decided to honor the sales — a $1.6MM set of reasons why they earn customers’ trust, repeat sales, and referrals.  Here’s the Twitter chatter about the incident.

The company has built a community of loyal customers on the strength of demonstrating it is serious about core values. And in turn, by virtue of them, it has created a profitable business. The company story attracted a lot of attention, so much so that Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose (Amazon affiliate link), the book by Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, climbed to #1 spot on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller lists in less than two weeks from its launch.

It’s never one person that makes a business a success, it’s always a team, even when that team is just wife and husband, it’s still a team.

It’s never one customer that makes a business profitable, even when that one customer buys a lot from that business.

You see the parallels? For you to turn a set of core values into a profitable reality, you need to enroll others to help you generate referrals and make connections. It is the quality of those values, and that of your belief in them, that attract the support and engender the level of passion necessary to build a successful business with a thriving customer community in it.

The essence of business strategy is choosing to perform activities different than competitors do. A strategic position your company takes can be based on customers’ needs, customers’ accessibility, or the variety of a company’s products and services. Trade-offs need to made in order to make all activities a company does operationally fit with each other.

You heard the saying: fast, good, cheap, pick two. By limiting what you offer on purpose, you work from your strengths — you can optimize what you do really well, and focus on continuing to do it very well. It’s very tempting for a company to start expanding and diversifying based on customer requests, on success in some areas, or an apparent hole in the marketplace.

However, if there is not fit — the activities are not consistent with each other, or they don’t reinforce each other, or there is no optimization of effort — your advantage is blown. Competitors may be able to match one of the activities, they may not match the interdependencies between them.

Take for example Netflix. We know the company for its movies and TV shows rental business. As the company CEO Reed Hastings put forth in a recent SlideShare set , which it shared openly on a social network, streaming increases Netflix market opportunity, growth, and competition.

Hastings maintains that to have profitable growth in such huge market, you find a segment in which you can gain and maintain leadership. That segment, the one content type for Netflix, is consumer-paid subscriptions. The presentation includes a fairly detailed high level analysis of competitive options. You will also see that Netflix has a handle on what customers use them for and a strategy: stay focused and run fast.

How do you weld your brand to your business strategy?

Once you’ve taken the time to discover what makes you different and how that difference will make your business viable, you need to articulate and communicate that value to your employees, your customers, and partners. Turning a strategy into performance means enrolling others to helping you execute on it.

In the Netflix example, Hastings communicated his strategy openly. Being clear on what you will or will not do is important to align the organization behind it and to manage customer expectations. Once you have identified priorities, you need to do them, demonstrate you walk the talk, and reinforce those actions with the experience customers have of your product or service.

This is how you weld your brand to your business strategy.

Promotional advertising is a pivotal part of a consumer good product’s go to market strategy. In recent years, digital media has acquired a larger share of those budgets. Pepsi and Coca-Cola have both stepped up their online efforts to include social media.

The way in which each brand integrates social media efforts with promotional advertising and public relations say a lot about the personality of the company and its culture.

The Pepsi challenge

Of the two giant beverage brands, Pepsi is the one that seems to have had the greater identity transformation, although, seen side by side, they seem to have borrowed significantly from each other. Pepsi’s logo is perceived to have changed more dramatically over the years. Thanks to brand new, you can see how the earlier chart that was making the rounds spoke to perception.

Pepsi’s greatest challenge turns out to be the recent decision to divert promotional advertising budgets to a grant that each month funds ideas. The refreshing everything project has predictably attracted much commentary in social media. The way it works is you can submit an idea that will have a positive impact, or vote for one. The blog associated with the project refreshes the news aspect and is created with the intent to personalize it and build community.

The online community had mixed reviews about the project. From early cautions about the program being a gamble upon its announcement, to posts that praised the action and those that marveled at the program being seen as an alternative rather than an adjunct to their Super Bowl ad campaign. Consumer habits are changing, and social media has earned its place in the mix. Can it stand on its own without the help of promotional advertising?

Is this new format shifting the responsibility from the corporation to the individual consumer? We do need to think more strategically about our resources, and so do brands. Will the social media halo extend to sales? This is the most important question for a product company to ask itself.

Has Pepsi won by avoiding the Super Bowl? It has been getting a lot of media coverage thanks to the PR value of its move. While fragmented branding is the 21st century reality, many are starting to raise the question of whether these philanthropic gestures are artificial sweeteners. Corporate social philanthropy needs to be authentic to the core of the company, and contest fatigue is starting to set it. Did Pepsi miss an opportunity to drive more traffic to its initiative, or to drive more sales?

As expected, given the lack of must see TV support in the guise of a Super Bowl ad, the initiative has also garnered the attention of mainstream media. The days when mass-market media was the sole vehicle to reach an audience may be officially over. How could we start reconciling again the purely entertainment value of some forms of promotion, with the potential of sustainable programs grounded in social?

Coke changes formula

No reason to panic. The only one change they made to their formula is potentially one of perception – from medicinal beverage to recreational drink. While rumors that the company used to put real coke in it seem to be still holding true, the quantity we’re talking about seems to be still quite small to make a big fuss over it 125 years later.

In the promotions department, coke’s Super Bowl spot contained charitable elements and was tied to a social media campaign that pledged $500,000 to the Boys & Girls Club of America. The company’s biggest buzz so far, in addition to its popular Facebook page, is its new social media policy. Keep in mind that this is for 1 million associates in 206 countries. It’s a feat of simplicity.

Coca Cola’s new online social media principles define three hierarchical levels of responsibility for its workforce: designated subject matter experts; social media certified spokespersons; and everyone else. Those not certified as spokespersons may not speak on behalf of the company. Certified spokespeople may speak in the company’s name but must refer difficult situations to subject matter experts. The principles apply to all employees but only appear to provide complete guidance to non-certified employees.

Coca-cola integrates many social media outposts and searches on its site. The most remarkable aspect of what the company is doing though is not on the communication end of things — it is on the product redesign side. I was at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta last fall and had the opportunity to meet David Butler, the man who is redesigning Coke. If branding is fragmented in this new reality, companies can and must create a central apparatus that is once specific and flexible, one that can apply all over the world keeping its focus on customers.

Butler did just that at Coke by helping the company understand design on purpose — to create value for the business through design and drive sales. Before it can communicate to the world, a brand needs to be aligned internally, work as a system, think about longevity, and cut through the visual clutter with identities that express its core essence. Coke is focusing more on how the product is delivered, packaged and experienced across the globe. Including how the company’s associates talk about the brand in social networks. Has the company bought into the incomplete manifesto for growth?

The company is also focusing more on the customer with its happiness theme. Neither Atlanta-based interactive agency Definition 6 nor Coca-Cola pushed the production with a publicity campaign. They let the brand’s considerable fan base find the video and share it on their own. I don’t drink soda, yet this video gave me the goose bumps! 1.5MM people had the same experience and shared it with their friends.

Distribution networks

If the whole organization is a system, its distribution networks need to be part of that system.

Coca-cola makes the introductions to more than 300 bottling partners on its Web site. Pepsi Bottling Group is one network.

Distribution for brands today means a lot more. It means how the brand is passed on from mouth to mouth through stories, testimonials, humor, fun, like in the Coca-cola YouTube ad we watched a moment ago.

Market share

This is where the rubber meats the road. The market capitalizations of these companies at close of business on Friday February 26, 2010 was:

The Coca Cola Company- $121.41BN

Pepsico, Inc.- $97.77BN

While Coca-Cola’s market share has been slipping, it still holds a significant advantage. In recent years, foreign sales have been lifting the company during recession.

Informal research in social networks

I posed the question on Twitter and FriendFeed on a late evening recently. I got several responses from people. Specifically, 9 unique responses on Twitter, 31 on FriendFeed, and 0 on Facebook. The number of votes is not proportional to the number of followers for those accounts. It maps more to how people engage in each network, which is a lesson that should not be lost on you.

The question was simple “Which one do you prefer? Why?”

I just used the image you see in this post as the visual, without even naming the products. Who won? 25 Coke, 4 either one, 5 neither, 6 Pepsi. Remember that it was a moment in extremely active streams with people doing and sharing all sorts of other things, including winter Olympics news. Just as if you dropped a question in any social space.

You will push back that it’s not scientific and there isn’t enough data to be statistically significant. That may be correct. Qualitative research is important, though, and in a Web 2.0 world there are fun ways to conduct informal, qualitative sampling. Not just by counting the numbers. What does the commentary add? Context.

Remember that I did not skew the question in any way and that Pepsi just ran a massively talked-about social media campaign — talked about in the same space where I asked the question. Pepsi launched and maintains a “room” with 615 subscribers on FirendFeed, which is where I got the most votes for Coke.

Tone, preference, and commentary — like Coke is less sweet, it has a richer taste, etc. — were offered for Coke, with Diet Coke winning the greater share of commentary. To note that among those mentioning Pepsi, the new “Pepsi has brought back real sugar in their Retro packaging” was mentioned.

Who won? Look at the market capitalization and the social integration for each brand. Then consider customer preference. The winning brand is the one that stays truer to itself.

The six social media trends for 2010 Dave Armano wrote about at HBR are by and large taking place today. With the increased emphasis on business as unusual, companies are starting to feel the real pressure of the permanent nature of customers’ new buying habits and decision making patterns.

Add to that a general trend towards social network fatigue, and what seemed like the salvation to boost many companies’ existing marketing programs, albeit more people-intensive, now seems to be a moving target for many brands.

In a research study dated last Fall, Forrester analyst Lisa Bradner discussed what’s next for modern brand management. She writes about the old model’s inability to handle the world of “always on” marketing social brought to the fore. Dubbed Adaptive Brand Marketing, the study makes a case for the shift from the classic four P’s — now table stakes rather than differentiators — to the addition of permission, proximity, perception, and participation, the four new P’s when it comes to social commerce for brands.

Social brand commerce

Adaptive brand marketing is in essence about using storystreaming, a term Armano used in a comment during the discussion of the HBR post, to engage in social brand commerce.

What are the implications of permission, proximity, perception and participation in the current online trends?

1. Social networks are looking less social — and thus help you get more done

We still get things done through search. The powerful Twitter and FriendFeed search functions have not gone lost respectively on Google and Facebook. Both companies incorporated those features in their algorithms.

The other trend under social networks becoming less social is the rise of subscription-based or velvet rope networks. They engage the four new P’s and help cordon off the increasing noise in the free for all online networks.

2. Companies that scale are making social media operational

Just like automation software is helping companies track the digital body language of customers interaction with their online content, technology will continue to help them scale social media efforts. Tracking who participates where from the company is just the beginning.

The best part is associating participation and proximity tracking with perception and subsequently permission. For brands to be able to learn and evolve through these activities, there needs to be a built-in knowledge mechanism with the technology that allows a company to make what it learns operational.

3. Social business is serious play

Tools like Foursquare are bringing to the fore the most social of human mechanisms, that of seeing and being seen. Carrots embedded in public game-like interfaces to engage human competitive nature are not enough over the long haul.

Brand participation as the same old sponsorship and coupon code is still phase I. With proximity there’s opportunity to capture real-time data and perform analysis that will reveal perception and set the tone for permission levels. Brands need to learn how to act on this information to further their products, services, and customer relationships.

4. Social media guidelines become policies

The widespread adoption of social networks by employees is making many companies nervous. That’s why the initial wave of guidelines will become policies complete with expected behaviors for individual participation as company representatives.

Companies struggle with the idea that proximity and participation will empower individual employees to gain more permission and a better perception than the brand itself. In addition, since so much of what companies do these days is knowledge-based, beyond the individual’s brand, companies will look to leverage that person’s knowledge exclusively. The recent move by Forrester to confine its analysts to blogs that reside on Forrester’s own platform for posts about research is an early example of that.

5. Mobile is the new personal hub

The last frontier of personal freedom for many individuals in the settings, access, and data they can hold on their personal mobile devices. Always on and with fewer filters than company networks, smartphones are becoming the new information and participation hubs.

We’re barely scratching the surface of what is possible with iPhone apps. At the same time as participation, proximity, perception and permission are becoming more personal, due to increasing privacy concerns, there will be a need to start separating social and commercial selves for brands.

6. Sharing off the company Web site is easier than ever

What started with email, continues with iPhone apps, social media outposts and content aggregators. All are making it easier for individuals to share content off and away from company Web sites.

As the official company Web site becomes more optimized than ever for search, it will be the place where transactions are made, and not where the conversation takes place. Social search meanwhile will move to tracking and alerting, which has the individual more in control where it comes to the four new P’s.

In 2010, we’ll see more social brand commerce like, for example, Best Buy’s Facebook fan page.

Are the organizational structures that support brands ready to address these already established trends? Will brands thus be able to capitalize on these trends for storystreaming? Or will companies tire of the conversation once they achieve the commerce end of the goal?

Everyone ignores you, until they cannot resist you anymore. This is how you build “attractive” in your brand — a combination of doing what has not been done before and of believing in what you’re doing. Of course, you need to have something to offer that people will find valuable.

That’s where communication comes in. Often discounted as the easy part, communication in an increasingly crowded and noisy product and service landscape can be what sets your apart. Different and interesting emerge when communication aligns with the your core brand value(s) with Zen-like focus.

The new world of attention and real time has people come up right alongside established brands and companies in vying for our attention, and often winning it.

Zen is the repetition of simplicity

It’s not necessarily a popularity contest, rather one of substance. Zen-like communication focus does not mean it takes a straight line. It’s also not about crafting messages in isolation of the reality of business. Instead, it’s about delivering on it time and time over, despite the fragmentation of media and publics.

In the last post here we talked about the characteristics of good brands — utility, experimentation, and design are among them.  People are looking for a relationship from other like-minded people.

The keyword here is looking. They’re not necessarily wanting to have a relationship with them, just yet. They may especially not want a relationship with your brand. Looking is a very different activity than having. In fact, often, when we have, we start looking again.

Just do

It’s not just the brain that thirsts for novelty, it’s the behavior of those around us that moves us elsewhere as we observe it. Hence utility, experimentation, and design are powerful concepts to align with your branding efforts.

• Utility – do something
• Experimentation – do something new
• Design – do something new that changes things

Communication is what you use to prepare the ground, manage, and learn. You may be surprised to know that the most comprehensive definition of communication encompasses a two-way process of reaching mutual understanding, in which participants not only exchange (encode-decode) information but also create and share meaning.

PSFK’s Good Brands Report 2009 highlights the fundamental ability by these companies to pursue their daily business commitments, be responsible, innovate, and be social while they retain Zen-like focus on what they’re about.

The report highlights several characteristics used to rate and rank the top 10 brands. Utility, experimentation, design, community and listening, to changing the model, going beyond the 30-second ad and prioritizing the environment all made the cut as desirable business traits and behaviors. Being helpful is the new black – utility is a call to operate as part of a system or context and understanding how to behave or your role and contribution within it.

Leading brands are very disciplined about knowing their values and communicating their value to customers in all channels and interactions by staying true to what they want to be and the role they want to have in people’s lives. For example, Google, the number one in the report, means accessibility and usefulness to many for whom the company’s tools are a way of life on the Web. Just think about Google Voice, Google Chrome, Google Wave, and Google Health – all services that come to you free of charge and have a negligible distribution cost for the company – and you will realize how much of your Web experience uses that brand as a platform.

Make your way through other companies on the list: Apple, Zipcar, Amazon, Virgin, and IKEA, and you will quickly see how being in contact with them or using their products means simpler and more enjoyable experiences through desirable products and remarkable service. Another common characteristic the top 10 good brands share is that they all have a very distinct personality. These are companies that dare be the best version of themselves and not a copy of some other company or brand.

PSFK summarize lessons for businesses on page 14.

What can You do to Become a Good Brand?

Learn to tell your company’s story with Zen-like focus. Develop an integrated communications program that sets your company apart. Locate your company’s online community, win their hearts, and earn results through digital media.

In future posts, we will examine practical examples and real-life scenarios that will show you:

• How to weld your brand to your business strategy
• How Zen-like communications focus will yield results for your business
• How to translate your company’s core values into referrals, connections, and customer community

A group of people working together towards a common purpose can form a community. In some instances, we call it company, in others neighborhood, in yet others we call it agency. When the group is really cohesive around its common purpose, they think of themselves as a tribe.

Brands go way back with us. They are our shortcut to meaning, the symbols we use to trade experiences via emotional impact. Images can remind us of events we enjoyed. Think about the stickers with product or group logos many put on their laptop cases, for example. They signify to us and the world that we like or identify with a certain product, brand, band, and so on.

If narrative is the shortcut the brain uses to make sense of the world, symbols are a short hand for the way something feels. Go way back in your memory and you will know why you kept the stubs from that concert you went to with your first group of friends. It’s not just the photographs, but the objects themselves that remind you of the experience when something was unique.

Logos as visuals

Today’s logos represent brands visually. With enough communication behind them, logos are used instead of phrases to point to a specific product, service, or story. Recall the Coca-Cola holiday advertising a short year ago, a product served as the punctuation for the fond memories of someone’s narrative – a life. Trace the history of the logo, and you will see that it has changed little since the beginning. It doesn’t need to – as a symbol, it’s still quite powerful.

Meaning of logos

The term “logos” had its origin in ancient Greek, it meant word. Since the time when language was invented, we use words to express what we think and communicate with each other. We should call ourselves lucky that someone also invented the written word, given how it enables us to transact, negotiate, connect, and with technology applications and tools it allows us to be social at a distance.

Language is very powerful. We take words as signs of actual events occurred in the past, described in the present, or, as it’s bound to happen, of things to come.

On New Year’s Eve, I asked a simple question on Twitter: Which word will you choose to focus on for 2010?

The words collected were: innovation, branding, determination, love, learn, simplify (2), revitalization, execution, intention, energy, nature, learning, health, collaboration, aloha, focus, diligence, integrity, service, organization, happiness, Alaka’i Managers, persistence, believe, servant leadership, conscientious, thoughtfulness, sharing, rest, volunteer.

Are these signs of things to come this year? Which brands will embody these ideas? One item of note – the words trust, transparency, authenticity, and honesty didn’t come up. To me this means that they are just a baseline, they should be there at this point.

Times Square image by Francisco Diez under a Creative Commons license

If you’re still working on figuring out search engine and page optimization, this post may not be for you. SEO and page optimization are still all about sites as destinations. That theory that says people will need to come to your place and you’ll do your best to have them stick to it. However, with social – and especially real time – we have people at the center. Their online presence and interactions create the connection, not any one specific place.

Which means that the context where your brand lives will be even more situational than it’s been in the past. All the hard work of deciding what the company or product story will look like needs to take place at the development and the service delivery stages, not just in the promotional phase. Owning your brand, it turns out, equals revealing the real core of the company – the real “it” through the real you.

Here are five real issues with real time connections and brands:

Click to enlarge

2. Investing more means putting skin in the game - it’s not a matter of budgets and funds anymore. Social participation is much more than buying ad space for a campaign. There are things your money won’t be able to buy. Things like honest interest, attention, time spent addressing questions and talking with people online.

3. Making the commitment to respond to market needs takes greater discipline - this requires extreme flexibility. Service companies may have a slight advantage over businesses that produce products. But only if the attitude and approach the organization takes are of learning continuously and innovating accordingly. One note on this point: just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should as it may not provide value to customers and results for the organization.

4. Creating strong products and services integrates tightly with talking about them - brand ownership is about aligning what a company makes, what it delivers, with how its customers and employees say about it. The very existence of the business depends on its ability to help people do what they need and want to do.

5. Delivering on your promises means creating operational abilities throughout the organization - real time means that at every touch point, you will need to provide the same kind of experience, not just conversation. Many smart organizations will start down the path of cross functional training. Functions that in the past were seen as corporate or administrative will become knowledgeable about the business and help further interaction and brand impressions.

Tomorrow’s brand leaders will emerge from commitment to living and breathing the business core values and express them through interactions. In each industry, there is opportunity for a company to set the highest standards for its field, measure the impact of its actions, and communicate from a well understood platform that demonstrates it walks the talk.

Stopwatch image by Casey Marshall. Licensed under the Creative Commons.

Leading brands lead because they are far out ahead creating something that has value to the people who need and want it.  The people managing those brands are not afraid to dare a little, to make choices, to limit number of features, for example, to go all the way to the edge.

I remember a conversation I had once with the person who was the lead business development for a major agency in New York city. He was talking about an internal project the agency was working on around launching new brands in a competitive marketplace. A few things he said back then stuck with me for years.

Two of them were that (a) people do not necessarily know if they’d buy or like something conceptually. Yes, who would have thought that we would fall in love with a device that you essentially need to replace once the battery runs its life? At the tune of hundreds of dollars. And that (b) bold statements work better than timid improvements. You can ratchet back something that is way out there, but you’d be hard pressed to get anywhere with something that is mediocre to begin with.

Average is the enemy of memorable, we have know that for a long time. How do leading brands stand out? In many ways, it all comes back to the experience they offer, which then feeds the perception of the brand. I would also consider three other characteristics that those brands have in common with leaders.

One

They have the ability to improvise based on context and available information. What is improvisation? According to the entry on Wikipedia, it’s the

practice of acting, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one’s immediate environment. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or new ways to act.

This invention cycle occurs most effectively when the practitioner has a thorough intuitive and/ortechnical understanding of the necessary skills and concerns within the improvised domain.

Improvisation and leadership go hand in hand because leadership has that built in ability to forge ahead and create new competencies. More and more as we talk about this three-dimensional conversation between people inside organizations with brands and customers, improvisational skills are taking center stage.

Enjoy this performance by Tommy Emmanuel.

The thing is we never have all the information, nor we may have the luxury – time, attention, resources anyone? – to be able to go down several paths. And testing is imperfect for the reason I outlined above – people may not know what is possible until it is available to them, maybe through sampling it first when others have it.

In case you’re interested, there is an Applied Improvisation Network.

Two

They focus on one or two characteristics that set them apart, even though they may have much more to offer. Yes, we have been talking about key differentiators for years. Yet, when we look at marketing messages, what we see is a sea of sameness. Why? Inability to choose one thing and commit to it.

Culture can be a differentiator. Personality can lead you to think differently.

Three

They spend more time where it counts, with customers. It is easy to see the world through the lens of busyness that colors our days. Immersed in the day to day programs, meetings, stuff to do, we may lose touch with those who really matter to the health of our brand.

Ask yourself and your brand, what commitment am I willing to make to do what I know I should do? This is akin to the description of a dream leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith described in an article for Fast Company:

“You know, I am incredibly busy right now. In fact, I feel about as busy today as I have ever felt in my entire life. To be honest, a lot of the time I just feel over-committed. To be real honest – given what is going on at work and at home – sometimes my life feels a little out of control.

But, you see, I am working on some very unique and special challenges right now. I think that the worst of this will be over in four or five months. After that I am going to take a couple of weeks and get organized. I am going to start working on my personal development. Then I am going to start spending some more time with my family. I may even start my ‘healthy lifestyle’ program. After that everything is going to be different -and it won’t be crazy anymore.”

The time to talk with customers is now.

We’re not in the times where we were in the fulfillment business anymore. Today we are in the demand creation business. Yet, many organizations are still behaving as if we were still taking orders galore. If you want to be in that position, you need first to focus on leading.

According to Philip Kotler, there are two types of CEOs — those who know they don’t understand marketing, and those who do not know they don’t understand marketing. They specialize in operational expertise, engineering, technical skills, and often sales. For a time we saw a few rising stars making their way up from marketing and customer support – these days you find fewer of them, especially in mature industries and in companies that need a new injection of growth. And many companies do.

That is too bad, because for an organization to grow beyond incremental gains – which in fact can be decreasing profitability, if you look close enough – once it gets to a certain stage of growth, you really need someone who understands marketing. To grow profitably, you need to make serious business decisions on the product/service line, service delivery, mix side of things. I favor the 90/10/90 rule — dedicate 90% of your efforts for the 10% of activities that will yeild 90% of the profit. It’s an outside-in approach.

When it comes to the state of the brand and business metaphors around that, we are probably all familiar with the term positioning. This is the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, service, brand, or organization. It is the ‘relative competitive comparison’ their product occupies in a given market as perceived by the target market.

You probably also noticed how pervasive the “war” metaphor is in business language – people in the trenches, kill the competition, or maybe just drive them out of business – and the adulation of the lessons taught by Sun Tzu in The Art of War. It was in this ancient book that positioning in strategy was explained as being affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment.

Tzu wrote that strategy is not linear planning like a to-do list – it requires fast and appropriate responses to changing conditions. While planning works in a controlled environment, in a competitive environment competing plans tend to collide, creating unexpected situations. 

War of position for brands can get quite expensive in today’s crowded marketplace.

In a war of position (thanks, Gerry), you:

• Conquer and own ground
• Own a position
• Reflect your strength in holding ground
• Bring customers to a place and evolve the place over time

The game here is about who owns what. Which is great if you have the ability to establish that position and remain unchallenged for it. It also requires a pretty large commitment of time and budgets, if the business does not truly own that brand. How many new brands can say they own a position? How many mature brands can also say that? Fewer and fewer.

With a mature brand that is looking to reinvent its way to growth, in addition to the smart decisions the business needs to make, you may be able to change the game by waging a war of movement. Many younger brands are doing that successfully.

What does war of movement mean? it means you:

• Own the movement, a direction
• Reflect flexibility and speed in holding the course
• Bring customers on a journey, a specific path moving forward

The game then becomes about who is going where. Companies who are immersed in these dynamics may also find that integrating new media and learning to become more social beyond customer care will serve them well.

Having worked in mature industries with mature brands, I also found that movement allows you to do several positive things that can help you grow the business.

You can:

• Focus more on creating and energizing
• Capitalize from collaboration with customers, partners, even competitors
• Promote your vision as a way to provide direction
• See more opportunities along the way
• Do your own thing and are not totally preoccupied with fighting someone else’s battle

This can be fertile ground for innovation and open the door to conversation, if the company can let go of what made it big, profitable and known up until it got to flat status on the growth chart.