The Brand University -- How to make a sustainable, successful brand
By Minter Dial & Eric Mellet

Executive Summary:

The world of branding has, over a very condensed period of time, undergone a virtual and very real revolution as far as both the consumer and the employee are concerned. The challenge that companies are now facing is how to adapt effectively and efficiently to several convergent paradigm shifts. This white paper reviews some of the major changes and raises questions about the implications for today’s leaders. This paper’s position is that, more than ever before, companies need to evolve into Learning Organizations (endnote I) and that instituting a company-wide Brand University can offer a compelling way to accompany such a change.

Building a successful brand is a more complex task

In today’s marketplace and, certainly, going forward, creating a sustainably successful brand has become a different and more complex task than in, even, the near past. The main factors that have brought about this shift are threefold: (1) the plethora of brands with the onslaught of new product launches; (2) the digital world (internet and mobility) with its ability to diffuse the power of traditional marketing and distribution; and (3) the latent lack of trust between the consumer and the brand, layered in with the lack of trust between employee and employer.

The consumer – certainly impacted by the economic pressures -- has pulled back from buying brands blindly. The luxury market, for example, has been distinctly hit, as there has been more scrutiny of the intrinsic value in the upscale prices. As Pam Danziger of Unity Marketing said in their 2009 study on the luxury market, “[a]ffluent consumers are redefining, reassessing and re-evaluating their lives and their lifestyles. This is happening across the culture, not just among a small segment of the affluent market and it will mean major shifts to how luxury brands can market their goods in the