Eyes glaze over

Mention brand vision and the eyes of many a marketing manager glaze over. Sure it all makes perfect sense in the marketing degree course- work and carefully argued text book theories. But what has it got to do with the real world of sales targets, beleaguered budgets and to do lists that never seem to get any shorter?

Well, a great deal if we simply change the wording from ‘brand vision’ to ‘company purpose’. Because they are truly interchangeable. And the idea that it makes sense to identify and isolate the company purpose is both understandable and doable. And to encourage us to make the company purpose, aka brand vision, the bedrock of our marketing strategy and communications, you only have to turn to our previous post ‘How brand vision creates successful companies’

But thanks to the work of Jim Stengal we can now identify the kind of company purpose that will leave the competition standing. After a ten-year study of more than 50,000 brands around the world he has proved that companies with ideals of improving peoples’ lives outperform the market by a huge margin.

An investment in the Stengel 50, the top 50 businesses in his study, would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the stocks and shares of Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 500 companies. So the indisputable fact is that doing the right thing in your business is doing the right thing for your business.

www.jimstengel.com