Rethinking brand strategy: operating principles vs values

Building ‘operating principles’ for brand strategy over specific ‘brand values’ can offer more flexibility to marketers.

When sailing to distant shores, operating principles are often more useful than brand values.

“An interesting... idea [is] that leadership teams must share common beliefs and values. This is now a frequent demand… One would hope that the experience of North Korea would have cured people of the idea that forcing everyone to believe in and value the same things is the road to high performance.”

–Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy

Maps matter.

When they’re well made and accurate, you can navigate to far off destinations, or use them to sail into the unknown in search of gold, knowing...

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We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

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