Nelson Mandela will go down as the greatest leader of the twentieth century, an inspiration for all. Perhaps it's time for companies to use him as a model for their strategy.
Creating a strong brand is now more important than ever before. And according to Dan Burrier, chief Innovation Officer of Ogilvy & Mather North America, it's possible for companies to create a "Nelson Mandela" brand.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, he points out that Mandela is mostly associated with freedom. And that creates a range of brand attributes:
• Know that you will never be remembered (or rewarded in the marketplace) for attributes; rather you will be remembered for what you do with them.
• Nail your market and world stance, and all else will follow. It's not so much what you make, what you sell; it's why you do it that matters, and how. The graveyard is littered with great gadgets and ideas that had no reason to be.
• Always stay on mission. Always execute against your stance, not against attributes. Measure the market's understanding of your reason to be – who you are and why you do what you do.
• When lured by the ease of chasing and measuring attributes (as we all are at times), test them by their opposites. For example, you want to be known as honest? Great. Know any company that wants to be known as dishonest? Therein lies the problem. Honesty is the price of entry for all. If you have to chase honesty as an attribute, take note, you've got much bigger problems than any list of brand attributes and research tools will solve.
• Finally, this applies to you, the human, as much as it does to your company or institution. You have your own set of adjectives and attributes associated with you as a person: the question is, what will you do with them?
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