The magic sauce that makes for a sure shot long-lasting brand success. That is the holy grail that most marketeers seek. And hope at least to have had a glimpse of somewhere along their career.
As a lifelong practitioner in the area of marketing strategy I have often looked for the grail in consumer insights, positioning, brand personality, advertising strategy etc etc. The search has always been from the inside out: a brand being designed to meet the needs – expressed or unexpressed – of the consumer, to beat the competition out there and in these days of rapid change, to anticipate, adapt and leverage emerging technologies.
However as my hair grey and my resume gets fatter with some successes and one too many failures I have begun to wonder whether the search for the holy grail been misdirected.
Is it plausible that sure shot, long-standing success of a brand is much more closely related to what’s “in there” and somewhat lesser to what’s “out there”?
That the DNA of brand does not come from the product, branding, positioning and advertising strategy but is determined from the attitudes and priorities of the brand owner. And if this DNA is of the right kind, a brand will, even as strong well-brought up individuals do, successfully adapt to what’s out there?
I have always been an admirer of Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines in the US. Kelleher passed away recently.
Southwest’s performance has been the stuff of business legend. Over 45 years in an industry rife with red-ink and bankruptcies, Southwest has never had a money-losing year. Southwest is the best performing stock over three decades. A $10,000 in the Southwest IPO thirty years ago is worth $10.2 million today.
What gives?
According to Kelleher, Southwest was launched less as a company and more as a cause.
A cause organised around a central purpose – to “democratise the skies” – to make flying easy, affordable and flexible for the average American as it has always been for the business traveler and the affluent.
Today this purpose seems kind of quaint, chiefly because it has been achieved and is a central component of the average American’s quality of life. But forty year ago it was revolutionary and Southwest was at the vanguard.
To Herb a brand is not about what it sells but what it stands for. Southwest’s brand went beyond being an airline, it stood for the concept of freedom.
A brand defined by purpose gains a rock on which to base long-standing success.
Business strategy might change. Market positioning might change. But purpose does not change.
The second key lesson from the Southwest example is that it is not enough to articulate a purpose. The organisation’s culture must be defined by its purpose.
If Southwest stood for freedom, everybody at Southwest needed to be a freedom fighter.
Southwest embodies this culture around “Eight Freedoms” that defined life within Southwest. These freedoms went beyond the organisation’s interface with its customer to the very core of a Southwest employee’s life ‘ “the freedom to learn and grow”, “the freedom to create and innovate”, “the freedom to create financial security”.
The organisation worked just as hard to deliver these “freedoms”its employees as its employees did to deliver on the freedom promises to its customers.
The third pillar of Southwest’s strategy was simplicity. For decades it flew just one kind of plane – the Boeing 737. A strategy followed with success by Indigo in India and ignored by Kingfisher with disastrous results. It followed the simplicity of organising around the point-to-point model avoiding the complexity and snarls of the hub-and-spoke model. It for a long time avoided extra charges for baggage and change fees – avoiding not just passenger ire but the complications produced.
The coda to the Southwest story is yet to be written.
With Herb’s passing the jury is out. As WSJ recently noted Southwest once the brassy upstart has begun to resemble the mainstream rivals it rebelled against”.
This is the syndrome that affects all revolutionary. It is yet to be seen whether Southwest’s new leadership can redefine their business and marketing strategy while being true to the core of what makes Southwest Southwest – purpose, culture, simplicity.
To my mind, “purpose, culture, simplicity” as the mantra to a brand greatness applies to most of the modern age’s great brands – Nike, Apple, Google and Facebook – to name a few. And the recent faltering of these brands can also be traced to missteps that are not true to these core principles.
In India I think the Tata brand has been built and nurtured around the core principles of purpose, culture and simplicity and its custodians need to be very cognisant of this fact as they negotiate the future.
In contrast the other traditional behemoths of Indian business – the Birlas, Reliance, Bajaj and Kirloskar – need to cogitate, define and rededicate themselves to their brand’s purpose and culture that has been core to their success til date and evolve and act to embody and leverage them with simplicity. The rewards will be rich and long-lasting.
hardraincafe.blog 
You are bang on! I could not agree with you more – a brand is created by the person and the passion exhibited by him / her. It then grows on its own – through word of mouth, advertising etc. and becomes a behemoth, but at the core of it is the person who is intimately involved in the creation of the product or service.
As a non-marketing person, i would like to posit that branding in the service sector where personal brand creation is even more possible, given your hypothesis, has not recived its due consideration. The Holy Grail has always remained product branding, and perhaps Marketing gurus like you should now look at this area as the next big thing to mould
Sunder
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