Thank you Branding Strategy Insider readers for helping us along the journey; offering your ideas, questions, suggestions, opinions and sometimes opposing views. You have helped shape us as authors, educators and brand strategists, and have helped make Branding Strategy Insider the leading resource for marketing oriented leaders and professionals.
As we soar into a new year with more wisdom in our possession, let’s look back on the 30 most read thought pieces of 2018 on Branding Strategy Insider. May they help you develop and release your brand’s full potential.
1. Beyond The Purpose Of Brand Purpose: It’s increasingly clear that today you have to stand for something if you want to remain standing. The explosion in purpose-led brand and business transformation is upon us, and it is far from over.
2. How Brands Compete And Win: Brand battles consist of far more than just marketing tactics and consume significant managerial attention.
3. The One Competitor Marketers Underestimated: An amplified need to belong and check status has turned into hundreds of millions of personal advertising campaigns, all competing against brands for attention. Going forward, your job as a marketer is not just to engage one audience group. You also need to engage friends of friends.
4. How Brands Can Avoid Culturally Flammable Ideas: If not careful, flammable ideas can quickly hijack, jeopardize and further deteriorate your marketing activities and decrease brand value.
5. The Role Of Branded Content In Building Brands: Branded content is about the powerful intersection between brands, culture and people. It’s not a discipline. It’s a new mind-set and culture.
6. Brand Management In The Age Of AI: AI is changing your brand. Is your brand changing with it? Most of us are already awash in articles and studies about AI, blockchain, marketing automation, analytics and big data. But this focus on tools and tactics diverts our attention from the brand management implications these tools create.
7. Successful Brand Cultures Live Their Beliefs: Nearsighted brand leaders imagine their brands first from the outside in, believing that attitude – what they say and how they posture matters most. Leaders with the modern legacy mindset build from the inside out in accordance with beliefs that drive behaviors because actions matter more than words alone.
8. The Future Belongs To Brands That Connect Ideas: When Steve Jobs said he was “shameless about stealing great ideas,” he meant it in the Picasso context. Anyone can copy a competitor. True innovation occurs when you build on the ideas that came before you.
