The Onliness of Strong Brands

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What you're looking for is not an idea that everybody believes is terrific, but an idea that gives people pause, yet that has undeniable benefits over existing alternatives. It takes intuition and experience to predict success this way, but I've found that the Good/Different tool gives companies more courage to greenlight the so-called "risky" ideas that create lasting profits.

In the section on "finding your zag," you pass on some advice your mother gave you as a child:, "Find a parade and get in front of it." You use the story to illustrate the importance of finding and capitalizing on trends. What are your most valuable information sources or methods for trend-tracking?

Other than Mom? Well, first I try to avoid getting hung up on specific predictions. You won't find the future in a book. Instead, I try to get my clients to look across the landscape of change with unfocused eyes, as it were. Powerful trends are easy to spot when you stand back far enough.

For example, there's a big trend toward openness, shall we say, or transparency. There's a big trend toward democracy. There are trends toward green living, slow food, alternative energy. Toward a preference for experiences rather than products. Toward a sense of community. Toward DIY. Modernist design.

Okay, but there are scores of trends, both mega and niche. Going back to your mother's advice, how does a company know which parade to get in front of? What is the right trend?

The right trend is the one that aligns best with your brand. If I manage the Wheat Montana brand, for example, where I'm selling grind-it-yourself wheat in supermarkets, I'm probably not going to jump on the modern design trend. No, I'm going to ride the trends toward slow food, DIY gourmet cooking, healthy eating, and the kitchen as the center of home life.

What can be really powerful is building your zag on several trends piled on top of each other. The iPod, for example, rides a bunch of trends—design, simplicity, miniaturization, widening broadband, return to community, and many others. These are all trends that are gaining, not waning.

What do you recommend to a client who finds his brand riding a trend it never intended to ride? For instance, a few years ago Burberry, to its dismay, found itself riding the trend of hip hop/street chic.

Live by the brand, die by the brand—or in Burberry's case, be embarrassed by the brand. It's a cruel world when customers own your brand. While you can't control the brand that customers build for you, you can influence it by giving them the right building materials. Burberry was blindsided because they didn't understand how their brand could be co-opted by another tribe.

You write that "when you look under the hood of a high-performance brand, you almost always find it's powered by a trend." Trends are powerful, but they are also, well, trendy. They come and go. They're hot, they're stale. How should a brand relate to a trend that it surely wants to outlive?

Let's not confuse a trend with a fad. Fads come and go quickly, and while they're here, they're in your face. Trends build slowly, and are so meek as to be almost invisible. The trend toward communicating by e-mail, for example, grew so slowly in the beginning that very few companies thought of building a business on it. Yet more and more people are shifting their business communications from voice to e-mail. How many new opportunities are hidden in this fundamental change of behavior?

You present the equation for a basic zag as "focus paired with differentiation supported by a trend and surrounded by compelling communications." Can you give a concrete example of this?

All the high-performance brands do it. But let's take a truly great expression of this formula: Mini Cooper. The brand is completely focused on a single product, albeit with many possible flavors. It's differentiated, in that competing manufacturers were converging on the sport-utility vehicle market.