Learn the “Soul” Of Brand Leaders

——for the people and enterprise that want to be the leader

(First published in Modern Weekly, Business version, Brand Thinking)

 The author is an experienced brand consultant, who has many
years’ experience in brand planning, marketing strategies and
integration of communication planning and implementation.

 Once worked as senior manager in multi-national and local

companies in marketing consulting and integrating
communications fields, experienced in strategic planning. He
formerly worked for CNC and was responsible for brand
management.
 Providing brand strategies, communication strategies and
implementation and training service for many international and
local clients. The brands include: FAW-Volkswagen, Jetta Cars,
263 Internet Communications, Dangdang Website, Aucma Air-
conditioner, FAW Toyota, Tour in Sichuan, CNC, LG, Beijing Yanli
Food, and more.
 He constantly ponders and develops professional settlement
methods in marketing, branding and communication fields, etc.
Lots of articles have been published in professional media such
as International Advertising, AD PANORAMA, Advertising
Pointer, China Marketing Communication Website (EMKT) and
so on.
 You are welcome to discuss your ideas and express your
opinions with the author.
Tel: 13901385424 E-mail: lei.sun@revobranding.com

Do you want to be NOKIA or SONY? There is no limit of learning skills; imitation can
only enhance efficiency, but can not form ability. Let’s try and “thieve” the “soul” of a
brand, to focus on core values of brands and decision-making will never be a wrong
decision!

Leaders are powerful figures who can change history. Brand leaders are the leaders
in there relative fields or industries.

Not everyone can become a leader just as not every brand can become a brand
leader. However, if any individual, any enterprise has the desire and courage to try and to
continuously learn, then with their efforts, they are likely to change and reverse their
inherent disadvantages, the plights of the market, and the strong competitors.

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 As for the enterprise that wants to become a brand leader, "how" is the key problem.
If there is no effective learning and action being taken, no book, theory nor guidance will
help the brand to achieve its success.

Leaders can not be imitated

NOKIA, SONY, MCDONALD’S, Disney and COCA COLA, these famous brands are
occupying the most vital positions in the minds of the consumers in different industries
and classes. They are definitely brand leaders in their fields. It is worth studying these
outstanding brands. Furthermore they have become objects for numerous enterprises
and brands to imitate.

However, we need to consider a key problem: can we repeat the brand leaders’
achievements through imitation?

We can properly answer this question through analogy. For example, do you think
you could be the second Lincoln, Churchill or Gandhi through reading their biographies,
learning, imitating or practicing their philosophies?

The question is obviously absurd! Because history can not be replayed, situations
can not be repeated, and experience of leaders can not be copied. When we read
leaders’ biographies, try to experience their situations, and feel their lives, we clearly
know that we can only appreciate their elegant demeanor, but we can never repeat their
accomplishments.

It is the same when we think about brands. As brand operators or researchers, even
if we have studied and learned the management framework, work methods and operation
skills from so-called brand leaders, and have successfully imitate them in each of these
aspects, we still can not copy their history, competition and market. Who do you think can
become the next Liu Xiang simply by knowing and following Liu xiang’s training
methods? Just as no one believes that we could fly if we were given birds’ wings and
only mastered how to flap them.

It is difficult for brands to achieve desired accomplishments by imitating others.

Therefore, we can not be another SONY, NIKE or IKEA!

Each leader, no matter what it is, a person or a brand, actually is a unique event with
small probability.

What are the similarities these small probabilities? Build to Last tries to explain why
enterprises can achieve continuous success. The answer is to have high expectations, to
look forwardly, to act uniquely, and to break old rules bravely. It seems like an ineffective

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solution, but yet the extended conclusion is very beneficial to brand operators. That is:
the essential factor of becoming a brand leader is not the technique, but the power of the
spirit. Leaders can not be copied and imitated; imitation itself can improve efficiency but
can not form ability! What we need to truly grasp is, the soul of the brand leaders this is
their true core value.

Focus on core value

Any person and any brand needs to answer three important questions before they
can achieve success: Who am I? What do I want to do? What’s my core value?

The simpler the question is, in fact, the more difficult it is to answer. The answers
decide the fundamental differences among enterprises. Drucker’s famous saying
provides guidelines for people: the first mission of an enterprise is to create customers,
beside this, there is nothing else. For a brand, its development process is to use concrete
actions to answer the original question: focus on the consumers’ value, and use great
products to meet the consumers’ demands.

From Disney we can fully understand in what way they respond to the brands
essence. In "Business Week", this amazing brand ranks No. 8 among the world's top 100
brands in 2006, owning a brand value of 27.85 billion U.S. dollars. It has numerous brand
logos and assets such as, The Lion King, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck and so on.
We can use one word to summarize its full value: laughter, Disneyland.

Its founder Walt was committed to bringing fairy tales in books to movies, and then
making the movies become amusement parks. From the screen image, to providing
consumers with a real entertainment experience, there is a huge gap. For Disney's
success, people with management experience, should be able to imagine the difficulty
and the pressure for the entrepreneurs who created and started Disney. But what’s the
strong power that drives Walt to overcome all those difficulties? His daughter said: "What
Dad wanted to do in the past is to make people happy, make them laugh. This was
always the significance of his life."

Like Disney, all brand leaders have a clear focus: making consumers more beautiful
is the goal of L'Oreal; making everything digital, is the brand core of Microsoft; providing
human-oriented mobile communications, entertainment and business tools is the
fundamental concept of Nokia. The powers of their focuses are so strong that even
different industries and categories present no barriers of brands extension. Virgin Atlantic
(Virgin) is a brand leader that extends its single brand to music, aviation,
communications, finance, beverages and other dozens of non-related industries and
categories which challenge all the classical theories in the economics and management
textbooks. When we go deep into Richard Bransons’s management and philosophy
cores we find that "unique, unrestrained freedom", its internal logic is so simple yet so

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powerful! For example, Virgin Airlines is famous for its unique services to the passengers,
such as providing massages even facials. In one of Branson’s single sentences he sums
up the secret of his success: "We never think that we are engaged in the transportation
industry, we are engaged in the entertainment industry, just 25,000 meters in the sky.”

That’s right, the core values that Virgin brand provides to the consumers is clear and
unified: give consumers a unique entertainment option in any dull and simple industry.
Therefore, Richard Branson himself can represent the entire brand’s products and
services, because he himself is a unique and active public figure.

It may be difficult for us to become these amazing brands such as Disney or Virgin,
also there is no need for us to deliberately imitate Walt’s taking care of everything spirit
nor Richard Branson’s entertaining public appearances, but we can learn from their
common character: focusing on a certain core value, and the implementing all the brands
activities basing on this value. This is precisely an important part of "soul" which is
commonly misunderstood by people as something not real or illusionary. But now, it is
time for you to imagine your brand core values, if you are not clear about this point, you
will definitely lose all possibility and necessity of "focus".

Decision-making

Knowing the brand's core values and setting the great goal of providing the perfect
products is only the first step in the long march of becoming a brand leader. There are so
many outstanding mobile phone designers who are disappointed by their insignificancy in
the face of the i-Phone; and there are so many experienced film directors who admit their
low competence after they watch the movie "Transformers"; there are so many well-
known garment entrepreneurs who feel ashamed of themselves in the face of ZARA’s
rapid, adaptable, market response strategy.

Don’t you want to launch products as outstanding as the i-Phone? Of course you do, it
is not because you do not want to; it is simply because you can not! That’s because, in
reality, the will of enterprises and their implementation capacity are often disjointed with
each other. So, we need to know how to build an implementation capacity. For
organizations, the essence of implementation is that numerous goals on different levels
were decided by people of different levels and different roles in the enterprise. Focusing
on the core values merely points out the direction, but how can we perfectly execute our
actions according to this direction within the organization? And make everybody in the
company able to put the enterprise strategy, conception and values into practice? This is
the key factor to enhance a company’s implementation capacity.

It is different perspectives, different concepts and different outlooks of value that lead
to the differences in company’s strategy and in implementation direction and effect. Any
enterprise, when they are making decisions, if they are considering problems of cost,

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time and efficiency, the answer will always be the same: receive maximum benefit with
the minimum cost.

But if we consider problems from the perspective of a company’s hopes, outlook of

value and exploration on human’s nature, the answer may be entirely different. Take the
driving mechanism of human resources for example: happy employees can provide
consumers with better services, and higher welfare can in turn effectively enhance staff’s
sense of satisfaction and belonging, this can make the employees happier which can
further help to achieve the goal of the companies. Different strategies from the two
perspectives will result in two welfare systems, while compared with the former, the latter
one, to some extent, does not possess the short-term advantages. This is because the
value that is created by a happy staff will be a long-term offset by the investment on
welfare. So not only focusing on return on capital may often, in the end, yield better
results.

The brand leaders will always consider the overall picture, starting from how to
provide great products, and then making decisions according to the future market trends
and the core values of the enterprise. This distinguishes the brand leaders from the usual
brands and this is far beyond the thinking on simple business and on investment return
rate. Particularly, when the commercial profit conflicts with ethics and social responsibility,
choosing the former, is just normal brand orientation, but choosing the latter is a brand
leaders demeanor.

When the leaders of SONY were trying to reverse the global view that "Made in
Japan" products were of poor-quality and low-price, the brand had already won the
potential to be great; when Johnson & Johnson were facing the serious TYENOL tablets
poisoning incident and were truly upholding the principle "facing of a crisis, companies
should first consider the interests of public and consumers ", and did not hesitate to
spend huge amounts of money in the shortest time possible to recall all of the millions of
bottles of this product from every major pharmacy, and spent 500,000 U.S. dollars to
issue a warning to the relevant doctors, hospitals and dealers. This company has already
safeguarded its great position and brand reputation.

Entrepreneur spirit

So, who can ensure the decision of an enterprise is practical and in accordance with
the enterprise’s directions and ideas? Who will be held responsible for the declination of
the brand’s direction, the decrease of the product’s quality and the disappointment of the
consumers? We can see that the top decision-makers indeed need to be finally
responsible for all decisions of the enterprise. All decisions of the organization, from top
to bottom, form unpredictable chains of consequence. To cast back from the bottom of
the uncountable chains to the top, the root is the enterprise’s top decision-makers whose

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thoughts and decisions defined the direction, the frame, the progress and the culture of
the organization and decide what the organization will become.

Enterprisers transform their own faith and spirit into the faith and spirit of the
organization, carrying out every detail in order to achieve excellent products and brands
through a series of perseverant, hard, indomitable and clever decisions. Brand leaders
come forth from the spirit of pursuing excellence and in the process of pursuing
perfection, and in the efforts of providing consumers with their unique core value.

Apparently, an excellent top decision-maker is the necessary asset to become a

brand leader. The decision-maker can be a person, like a CEO, or a group, such as the
management committee of an enterprise, or the relatives of a familial enterprise. No
matter which kind of form, the role of a decision-maker is the same to that of the brand
leader, they decide the company’s dreams and future, decide the ways of realizing an
objective, and directly or indirectly decide the uncountable details in the process. If there
was no Wangshi, Vanke could hardly achieve such a sudden success; if there was no
Jack Welch, GE could hardly continue its brilliant glory of creating the management
legend when other cross-industry enterprises are in a difficult situation.

What we are talking about is not only enterprises and enterprisers; also brands,
organizations, as well as products. In fact they are one integrated mass. People,
enterprises, products and brands are an in an endless process of practicing, promoting
and pursuing. Through this process leaders are created.

Leaders can be learned from, but can not be imitated and copied. People,
enterprises and brands are all the same. As for the Chinese enterprises, they always
learn the “form” and “skills”. However, the important thing is to grasp the “spirit” and
“soul”.

100 years ago, the saying “to learn the advantages of the foreign invaders first and
then defeat them” led us in a direction which was perhaps not quite correct. It is not very
hard to master techniques, tools and modes; the most difficult thing is to have the
courage to admit the deficiency, to patiently start from nothing, to bravely break through
routine, and to firmly not follow others. That is the way to assure being a leader from
heart. Only such an enterprise, enterpriser, product and brand can become a leader of
people, a leader of the industry, the backbone of a country and the future of China!

Brand Think Tank

Disney focusing on happiness

Walt, the founder of Disney, committed his life to this goal: bring people happiness
through a perfect experience. To achieve this, he bravely took risks that no one else
could have undertaken.

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 In 1934, Walter decided to recompose the fairy tale Snow White into a cartoon film
which would cost 500,000 U.S. dollars at that time. Under the pressure of everyone’s
opposition, Disney still firmly risked bankruptcy to invite 300 artists and have them spend
3 years in accomplishing this “mission impossible”. On December 21st, 1937, Snow
White was launched, which brought Walt well-known cartoon characters and 10 times the
investment returns.

Also, to achieve the target of bringing consumers pleasure, he bravely devoted heart
and soul to a completely unknown field. The magnificent achievement which he
accomplished and to this day is still bringing large rewards to the company is the Disney
Land. Walt designed it in person and supervised the implementation of every detail; he
rode the Disney Land Park Tram to imagine tourists’ reactions. When the construction of
Disney Land was completed and has achieved great success, he still tried his best day
and night to improve it in order to provide consumers with a perfect experience.

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