Brand Enigma : Decoding the Secrets of your Brand

This is not a textbook on brand strategy or brand management, although it touches on these subjects. Brand Enigma takes as its theme the bigger role of brands in promoting organisational success. More specifically, it proposes an approach that can help to turn a brand into a business asset by making explicit the deeper, often hidden or forgotten drivers of success. Examples are taken mainly, but not exclusively, from the world of business.

Whether you are a small business, a school, a political party, a multinational, a municipal authority, an orchestra, a sports club or an entrepreneurial start-up, you have a brand. Your brand may be a global colossus. It may be niche. Or local and invisible to all but a handful of contacts. The brand may have been subject to detailed attention and lavish investment. It may have been neglected. Your brand may once have been great, but now in the doldrums. Your organisation may even be in denial that your brand plays any significant part in shaping your fortunes. Wherever you are on this spectrum, you can be certain that whether you like it or not, you have been branded – by everyone who knows you. They all have their own idea of what you stand for, which may be cause for delight or dismay, depending on their views.

Customers, suppliers, partners, employees or members of the community that deal with you all take away their ideas of what your organisation ...