One of the most important yet least understood assets for any company is its brand. In a world besieged with competition and rising consumer expectations, a good product or service has become the cost of entry. Great companies transcend tangible and functional benefits by creating positive emotional ties that can easily outlast any individual product or service. It is not just what you do anymore. It is also how you do it.

Brandstream believes that products, technologies and marketing campaigns are essentially means to a much greater end – a strong, multi-faceted and desired brand. A great brand is a story that is never completely told – each new product, promotion or advertisement is just another passage, one more chapter, and one more revealing insight into a complex yet familiar plot.

Companies must now communicate through a myriad of traditional and non-traditional storytellers and leverage every potential point of contact between brand and customer. Companies like Starbucks understand the value of experiential marketing and delivering a consistent, multi-sensory, high quality experience. For any brand that wishes to emulate the success of Starbucks – be it retail or non-retail – everything matters.

A company like Nike looks to the intrinsic and timeless core values of its brand as the fundamental organizing principle for its business. Clear internal brand positioning provides both the inspiration for innovation and the guardrails for growth into new markets and new categories. Expanding "brandwidth" without a deep understanding of brand dynamics is dangerous. As we move into a business environment that is growing ever more sensitive to the effects to globalization, brands will play a profound role as conscience for corporations as well as the communities that support or reject them. For this reason, companies must develop an intimate and real-time understanding of how their brands are not just viewed but how they are felt. Success in the future will be achieved not just by doing things right, but by also doing the right thing.