Profiles Brand Leadership

"Just do great things." That was the closest things to a job description I would get from then Nike CEO and Chairman Phil Knight on my first day. As brand leaders go, there are few better than Phil Knight. But he had just dealt with the greatest leadership challenge of his life. In the wake of tumbling sales and the rise of Reebok as America’s #1 athletic footwear brand, he laid off 12% of the company. If that weren’t bad enough, the heads of Product Design, Marketing, and Advertising all resigned. A handful of us were hired to began filling that void and positioning the swoosh beyond young male jocks to something more timeless, ageless, and compelling. Working with a tiny Portland Oregon advertising agency, we developed one brand voice that could speak to anyone, anywhere on earth, about sports, fitness, self-empowerment, and the world we lived in. “Just Do It” wasn’t just an advertising campaign. It sparked a much-needed transformation of marketing, product innovation, and brand storytelling.

After leaving Nike I sent my first book manuscript to five CEOs I did not know, and from industries I knew nothing about, to see if what had worked at Nike might apply elsewhere. One of them invited me to Seattle for a cup of coffee. Before our second cup, Howard Schultz asked if I would consider joining him as Starbucks Chief Marketing Officer. In the months and years that followed, we proved that a coffeehouse chain did not have to be an oxymoron, and that you could give part-time, minimum wage employees stock options, health care benefits, and a great place to work. We transcended the cup in 1995 by building the brand one cup, one person, one community at a time. One year later Starbucks was opening one store a week in America. Three years later we were opening one store a day around the world. The “Third Place” positioning remains a seminal case study in brand positioning and experiential marketing.

After leaving Starbucks I resumed writing and created Brandstream, an advisory firm for CEOs guided by best brand practices developed at Nike, Starbucks, and four years in Silicon Valley. “A New Brand World” is still relevant today as a field guide for CEOs and front line employees in a much more transparent, consumer-empowered, and disrupted age. Brandstream operates as a bespoke group of extraordinary men and women working together for projects to meet the needs of clients including Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Corona, Microsoft, VWAG, Ferrero, Kaiser Permanente, NASA, the US Navy, Starwood Hotels, Samsung, Cordis, Dignity Health, and many others.

The relationship with America’s largest and oldest managed healthcare system, Kaiser Permanente, began with a request to help with advertising but ended with a complete repositioning of the brand across all touch points. Our “Big Dig” insights study in 2003 revealed an aching need to move beyond a broken sick care system in America to more preventative total health care and prevention approach. Working directly with Kaiser’s Plan and Physician executive leadership teams in 2003, we transformed a blue-collar, slightly post World War Two-era institution into one of the most progressive and trusted 21st Century healthcare providers. The “Thrive” marketing campaign launched in 2004 was a bold departure from all healthcare marketing, drove record enrollment, dramatically improved brand perceptions among members, and the general public, and helped guide the design of a $40 billion in new facilities over eight years. Perhaps most important, it inspired 165,000 employees and caregivers yearning for innovation and a more noble brand purpose.

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In 2001, one of the most iconic brands in history sought help in strengthening waning relevancy among younger consumers for its flagship carbonated products, and to explore opportunities for beverage portfolio expansion. Consumer insights conducted across ten countries helped Coca-Cola reimagine its approach to customer listening, to portfolio development, to advertising, package design, and health concerns. Working with the Modo Group, led by the former head of brand development for Starbucks, George Murphy, we explored opportunities for experiential marketing and a new visual brand language that could be applied across more than 200 countries. Midway into the project our deliverables shifted in the wake of 9/11 to include deep exploration into global perceptions of brand America, American institutions, and the most American company of them all, Coca-Cola, in a tumultuous, terrorized world, including markets where “Brand America” was in decline, to see what defined a “good company.” Few insights projects have been more prescient for what brands face today in this hyper-partisan age of algorithmic disinformation and rage.

In 2005, Grupo Modelo leadership in Mexico City asked for help strengthening its flagship franchise, Corona, the third largest beer consumed around the world, and to review portfolio opportunities across its other nine brands. Qualitative and ethnographic research on four continents suggested a pressing need for a more unified brand positioning, prompting new strategic brand initiatives and executional guardrails for distributors that could apply to any market. New processes for evaluating and supporting distributors, channel decisions, marketing programs, promotions, and licensing opportunities, were applied to help one of the most authentic beers in history navigate headwinds created by new competition from microbreweries and a growing consolidation of beer industry competitors. The strength of Modelo’s brand portfolio positioned it for a lucrative acquisition by Budweiser/InBev and Constellation Brands a few years later.

Starwood’s brand portfolio — the St. Regis, the W, Westin, Sheraton, and Four Points by Sheraton — needed to refine their identities, individual core strengths, brand positioning, and purpose. Focus groups with brand leaders ini eight countries provided the insights needed to map the most meaningful emotional connections and experiences possible in the industry. Each brand identified unique strategies and tactics for delivering against eight timeless human needs. At the completion of the project, the purpose, values, and key strategies for each brand was distilled to a page, a paragraph, one sentence, three words, and a three-minute video. Some were able to reduce the process to a single word, nearly impossible for most brands. For the St. Regis it was “bespoke.” For the W: “Flirty.”

In June, 2008 Airbnb could not sell 10% of the company for $150,000. Seven potential investors received the letter. Two never replied and the others all passed. In its early years, the rejections made clear the challenge for Airbnb, articulated by one investor told CEO Brian Chesky, “I hope you have a backup plan. Not very very people are going to rent their home to strangers.” Three years later, after Airbnb’s Class A round netted $110 million for the same 10% of the company., Chesky called and asked for help building a brand that would stand next to Nike and Apple. .To build the trust needed, Airbnb began to storyboard and measure a dozen critical touch points for host and guest journeys. To leverage it growing platform for the greater good, a fundamental leadership principle for any brand, it helped hosts in New York and New Jersey open up their homes for free to thousands displaced by Superstorm Sandy, while preserving Airbnb’s platform services, insurance coverage, and marketing capabilities. In the decade that followed, Airbnb.org has helped house more than 350,000 displaced by disasters around the world. In 2016, it banned hate from its platform, barring any host or guest who violated its “Community Commitment,” an anti-discrimination, anti-hate, code of ethics. Today, while Facebook/Meta and Twitter/X choose not to filter harmful division, conspiracies, and election-tilting lies from their content, Airbnb has accepted the responsibilities that come with power.

For Samsung, competing with Apple in 2012 would require more than improving product features and benefits. It would entail defining the Samsung experience at its best at every touch point it had, just as Apple had done perhaps better than any other brand on earth. A team of former Nike, Apple, and Starbucks store design, store development, operations, consumer insights, and marketing experts were brought together by Brandstream and the Modo Group to help Samsung explore new retail concepts — from store-in-stores, to pop-ups, to branded flagships. Working with Samsung’s CEO and global leadership team in Suwon City, Korea, the team developed the consumer insights, brand strategy, and business model assumptions needed to inform architecture, design, and construction management firms capable of keeping pace with one of the most aggressive, fastest growing companies in the world.

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Campbell-Ewald, advertising agency for Navy Recruiting Command, asked for advice on its pitch to retain its Navy recruitment business, one of the agencies largest clients. When informed that they were about to pitch “The Best Job on Earth” as a new tagline to Navy leadership, we offered to help find another way forward. For insights, we conducted a “Noah’s Ark” exercise on the base at Norfolk, Virginia, with 15 groups of two that represented a cross-section of fliers, surface ship mates, base support, submarine “boomers”, and special forces SEALs. Winning hearts and minds of young men and women (and their parents) in America was important, but so was shifting opinions around the world where brand America was losing trust in an age of controversial military involvement on foreign lands. The new tag line, “A Global Force for Good,” spoke to the ways America’s Navy kept vital sea lanes open, provided rescue and relief services in the wake of natural disasters, helped remove terrorists who threatened America and its allies, and packed the most lethal power on the planet beneath the wave.. The campaign demonstrated the growing need to address potential terrorism at its roots and prevent avoidable wars. Unfortunately, the positioning fell victim to the rising “America First” isolationist movement six years later, in 2015, as America began to turn away from the global power for good it once defined.