Brand Enigma : Decoding the Secrets of your Brand

‘Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past.’

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Four Quartets

As the story of the evolution of the brand dream described in the previous chapter explained, it was a journey born of frustration with the whole way in which companies have traditionally managed their brands. This mounting dissatisfaction led to a search for other methods of stimulating creative solutions and escaping from largely unproductive and tired approaches to brand management. In many ways the mission was extremely ambitious. We set out to solve not only one set of process-related problems. We also wanted to provide a tool kit that companies could use to deconstruct their brands and reassemble them based on a whole set of fresh insights into what they were all about. Having decoded the brand, the pieces of the puzzle needed to be reconstructed in a form that could be understood and applied throughout the business.

Just as we felt that the answer to the process challenge was not going to be found in the standard brand development manual, so we took a first-principles approach to creating the brand dream model. It had to have the virtues of being highly practical, capable of inspiring action and being memorable. So in parallel with the exploration of experiential processes and methods for posing questions about the brand, we ...