Fast Company Quotes

If your brand is a cliché, your brand is losing sales and growth. Why? If your brand is using clichés to promote itself, you’re promoting your “category,” not your unique, individual brand. Painful? Yes. Solvable? Absolutely.

Brands are either built on reruns or coming attractions. The future has no road map while the past does. Creating a brand that blazes new trails can sometimes be bumpy but will also allow you to be the first to discover something new, something meaningful and something that makes others ask, “Why didn’t we think of that?” Be very scared of “old tricks” and build a spirit of innovation. It’s the “old tricks” that have the highest risk, not doing something bold.

Customers have a first moment when they discover your brand. If you were to look at it today with a fresh pair of eyes, in fact only through a pair of fresh customer eyes and witness your brand for the very first time, what would you see? What impression would make? Or fail to make? Would your brand blend in? Would it stand out? Would it be memorable, or the leading cause of amnesia amongst shoppers everywhere? Facing the truth of this and fixing it as needed will determine whether your brand thrives or merely stumbles along.

Launching a brand is not for those with thin skin. It takes courage, intelligence and foresight.

Look at every ‘revolutionary’ brand or category killer, it had an app, or a feature, or a functionality, or a user experience nobody else at that point could offer. I refer to this as ‘the Killer App’ principle.

Social media isn’t a brand strategy. Social media is a channel. While it’s important for a brand to develop something to say, it’s more important to create something that will be heard.

So it comes down to scarcity, one product or service having qualities you won’t find everywhere or ideally, anywhere. It’s the job of every brand to seek that out as their standard, their stamp.

Every great brand goes back to a courageous individual who dared to say 'NO' to the status quo.

Having a me-too brand is a death sentence.