16/10/2021
Building the Starbucks brand, however, is deja vu for Bedbury: his first great brand was Nike Inc. When he joined the Beaverton, Oregon-based footwear and apparel company in 1987, Nike was a $750 million business; when he left seven years later, Nike was a $4 billion business. In between Bedbury directed Nike’s worldwide advertising efforts and broke the “Just Do It” branding campaign. “I can honestly say that Nike left its imprint on me in ways I never thought possible,” Bedbury says, “largely because of the strength of the Nike culture.”
Whether the product is sneakers, coffee — or a brand called You — building a great brand depends on knowing the right principles. Fast Company asked Bedbury to identify his eight brand-building principles.
1. A great brand is in it for the long haul.
For decades we had great brands based on solid value propositions — they’d established their worth in the consumer’s mind. Then in the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of companies sold out their brands. They stopped building them and started harvesting them. They focused on short-term economic returns, dressed up the bottom line, and diminished their investment in longer-term brand-building programs. As a result, there were a lot of products with very little differentiation. All the consumers saw was who had the lowest price — which is not a profitable place for any brand to be.
