Brand Leadership
What does it mean?

Leadership is a much debated subject. The debates range from whether we are born or made as leaders, successful personality traits, do’s and dont’s, creating more leaders or followers, standing the test of time and hundreds of other topics. But at least there is consensus on who is a leader and what defines leadership.
When it comes to brand leadership, the subject becomes muddier. At the very onset, brands are not human beings. They can’t act on their own, but need to be directed. They don’t have in-built learning mechanisms, but are built over a period of time. They don’t have behavioural guidelines but can be created and marketed using a fixed set of principles. They are definitely not meant to create followers, which is a derogatory concept in brand building. Last but not the least, they don’t have the classic human traits of adaptability and flexibility (according to modern brand building principles, a brand needs to stand for something over a longish period of time to mean anything). Arguably the only trait that a strong brand shares with a strong leader is “grit”.
So how do we define brand leadership? Or more importantly, create and write brand leadership stories that can be emulated or can act as sources of inspiration?
No article on leadership is complete without a powerful quote, so here is the one (and only one) for this piece:
“Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and discipline … Reliance on intelligence alone results in rebelliousness. Exercise of humaneness alone results in weakness. Fixation on trust results in folly. Dependence on the strength of courage results in violence. Excessive discipline and sternness in command result in cruelty. When one has all five virtues together, each appropriate to its function, then one can be a leader.” — Sun Tzu
According to Sun Tzu, leadership is about having a balance. I will simply borrow the concept of “balance” for this piece, because the underlying components can be debated in thousands of different ways.
Principle 1:
Balancing commercial aims with the need to give back to society
It is important to remember that brands are created by human beings. Whether it is a entrepreneur who ends up creating a global organisation or it is your friendly neighbourhood butcher, brands are creations of people. The sole premise of why brands came into being was to create differentiation between produce, add functional and perceptual value, add a price tag to that value and sell the branded produce to earn profits. Commercial aims define brand building and will continue to do so till the time money remains the tender through which we need to live a life.
But brand leadership can be created by giving back to the society in two ways:
Selfish — Giving back with the aim of more commercial gains but through a sense of wider empowerment
Selfless — Giving back with no intention of commercial gains and with a complete de-linking with the brand life cycle
What Starbucks is doing in some of America’s underserved communities (e.g. Missouri) falls in the spectrum of selfish and selfless, but is more skewed towards “selfless”:
But brand leadership can be created by giving back to the society in two ways:
Selfish — Giving back with the aim of more commercial gains but through a sense of wider empowerment
Selfless — Giving back with no intention of commercial gains and with a complete de-linking with the brand life cycle
What Starbucks is doing in some of America’s underserved communities (e.g. Missouri) falls in the spectrum of selfish and selfless, but is more skewed towards “selfless”:
In this brilliantly piece in The Atlantic, we have enough examples of what I will define as “selfish” attempts to create brand leadership (the word of importance here is attempt). Yes, and I can already anticipate the argument, what you embark upon doing in one community is not easily scalable for your wider footprint (aka Starbucks):
Balancing commercial gains while giving back to society is difficult, but who said leadership is easy. Patagonia Works is the umbrella organisation of Patagonia that manages the organisation’s initiatives around solving complex environmental challenges and having a strong political voice (a required trait in the complex world of environmental dealings). Through the umbrella organisation, Patagonia donates millions to grassroots non-profit organisations, provides training and support to environmental activists and builds global supply chains for organic cotton and sustainably grazed wool.
Principle 2:
Balancing the need for growth with the need for being responsible
Growth is a continuous need for brands. Without growth brands die. Loyalty has become a luxury and the loyal customer is becoming extinct. Growth is an engine that needs to run with its tank full, relentlessly and without any breaks. Growth is the elixir and is the panacea of all evils.
But the need for growth brings along with it irresponsibility. The need for growth attracts greed (e.g. Enron, the sub-prime crisis), causes knee-jerk reactions (e.g. New Coke) and triggers uncontrolled expansion (think of rampant innovation and bursting-at-the-seems brand portfolios). More recently, the need for growth is still making business leaders back Trump after the Charlottesville tragedy.
Patagonia is my favourite so here is more evidence on how you can grow a brand responsibly (and why as human beings we still have the discerning sense to differentiate between a faff and the real thing):
The need for growth fuels rampant consumerism. A true leader brand will aspire to reduce consumerism while still finding avenues for growth. In a 2015 opinion piece in Fast Company that analysed falling sales of Apple iPads, there is a sentence that defines brand leadership (albeit from a design and technology point of view):
“Let’s champion Silicon Valley for building something we don’t all need throw out every two years. Good design means something is used, not replaced.”
The writer of the opinion piece is a founder of an online philanthropy firm, so the views are not surprising.
The financial services and banking industry is not a common hunting ground for brand leadership stories (but more for brand failures). But there are sincere attempts to reforge and rebuild brands and put them back on the leadership course. One of them is Brian Moynihan’s attempt to rebuild Bank of America to powerhouse status. Why am I putting this under the heading of achieving balance between growth and being responsible? It is because of Mr. Moynihan’s pledge to grow organically (and shed its acquisition-driven greedy image of the past) and maximise shareholder value:
Principle 3:
Balancing the need to evolve with the need to stay relevant
No one wants a leader who is a chameleon. On a similar vein, no one wants a leader stuck in ancient ways. Consistency of character needs to stand the test of time (and time is always changing).
For brands aspiring to be leaders, this is one of the most difficult tests. Real knowledge and deep understanding is slowly becoming a reserve only for academics, while marketing and brand building is increasingly being run on whims and fancies. Leaders don’t act on whims and fancies (and on the contrary they completely ignore them).
Majority of brands are nowadays stuck in what I would call the “innovation rut”. Richer data and advanced analytical techniques have enabled better segmentation of consumer needs, but there has been only minor improvements in the mindset that each consumer need can be satisfied with a different product / variant / sub-brand / line extension.
Brand leadership requires brands to cut plumes. The need to stay relevant (aka meeting consumer needs) has nothing to do with new product launches. In this HBR article, Prof. Gary Pisano argues the need to stick to routine innovation to build strong brands and generate growth. All the examples in the article are of brands that are iconic, who have stayed relevant by carefully focusing on enhancing the quality and functionality of their products:
Leadership (and brand leadership) is about consistency. The definition of consistency can be numerous but can be encapsulated under the themes below:
Excellence — Brand leadership needs to be defined by consistency in excellence. Excellence is a hard graft and more so when it is needed consistently
Commitment — Leadership requires commitment. Brand leadership requires commitment towards manufacturing and selling excellent products, maintaining superior customer service and delivering life-enhancing value
Courage — Like leadership, brand leadership requires courage. How do we define courage? By not diluting a brand’s principles, not veering off course, not indulging in whims and fancies, not been driven by short-term mindsets and not giving in to acquisition threats
Continuity — Brand leadership is about ensuring continuity of principles, values and vision over hundreds of years, across generations, across changes of ownership, across leadership styles and across changing economic, social and political climates
Perseverance — The word ‘perseverance’ has the underlying notion of continuity and long-term attached to it. Brand leadership is not a 2 year concept, neither is it a 5 year concept and nor is it a 10 year concept. Leader brands lose their category dominance status but they regain it. They go into downturns but come out of it. They risk getting obsolete but make themselves relevant again. They lose sight of their targets but are able to refocus. They face obliteration but find ways to rejuvenate themselves
Through these three principles, I have highlighted the strong polarising forces that require balancing to attain brand leadership status — commercial gains vs. community empowerment, growth vs. responsibility and evolution vs. relevance.
Brand leadership is not about a glossy purpose and vision statement framed in glass. It is not about being the most valuable brand in the world or being the most recognised. It is not about a logo that has stood the test of time. Brand leadership is a combination of three things that lasts = Excellence + Value + Impact
The Chevrolet Suburban has been there long before the word SUV was invented:

