Working with the hotel’s leadership team, we have established that this new take on Southern hospitality produces a special takeaway for guests….the feeling of being “Southern Comfortable.”

A big driver of the Capital’s brand story is its culinary innovation, led by Executive Chef Lee Richardson. Richardson, a transplant from some of the premier restaurants in New Orleans, was inspired by the indigenous foods and foodways of Arkansas and the South. He connected with local organic and sustainably grown producers and has created a local “food chain” that reaches from the local farm to the Capital table.

Before “Southern food” was “Southern fried,” it was handmade, homegrown and prepared with loving kindness. Southern food was fresh from the kitchen garden or the back-40, pulled this morning from the farm pond or the milch-cows and kept fresh in the springhouse. Our pretraditional Southern forebears knew from whence their dinners came–and it was NOT Kroger!

I titled this “living your brand” because the Capital Hotel is producing an innovative and unique experience, and the opportunity for brandologists to study a business that’s intentionally living out its unique brand story.

On a weekend in November, the hotel and culinary team will partner with P. Allen Smith and Blackberry Farm–two notable food and farm destinations–to produce “A Tale of Two Farms.” In 5 meals and two days, the personalities behind these three extraordinary properties will give guests a private glimpse behind the curtain–of the culinary arts, vinology and sustainable farming.

Lee Richardson calls his special take on Southern foodways “New Americana Cuisine.” A Tale of Two Farms will be a memorable plunge into this new genre and an extraordinary opportunity for fans of food and fans of brands to take a post-graduate course in the disciplines.

Check it out at: A Tale of Two Farms

In a live your brand company, the brand starts and ends at the CEO’s door. Think about Steve Jobs at Apple. He’s probably the pinnacle of the brand CEO.

For the brand CEO, there are just a few imperatives regarding his or her leadership of the brand:

• know what it is
• know what it isn’t
• be champion, cheerleader, communicator
• see and be seen
• carry the flag and bang the drum

When John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, “the plumbers of the Internet,” was interviewed several years ago, he made the statement that it was his job in EVERY conversation to reiterate the core objectives of the company. If he wasn’t doing that in even a 5-minute briefing, he wasn’t doing his job.

So it is with brand stewardship. The big boys do it, and the small business CEO must do it as well. Once again, the small business has an advantage—she can personally interact with a great deal more of her organization every day. The CEO of Wal-Mart can’t touch one million employees very often. But the CEO of the small and middle-market business can touch his or her employee base all the time.

A couple of parting shots on the brand CEO from a couple of the big boys in branding theory and practice:

“The executive with the best opportunity to observe the company from all viewpoints and empowered to make appropriate changes is the CEO. He or she is the one who must have the creativity and foresight to determine where the company should be heading, the communications skills to impart this vision effectively to others, and the power to secure funding to implement whatever changes are required. In other words, the initial responsibility for successful corporate branding has to be the CEO’s alone, even though the organization executes branding and is ultimately responsible for its success or failure.”

—James R. Gregory, “Leveraging the Corporate Brand

“…companies that treat their brands as the sole purview of their advertising, marketing or brand management departments are often unsuccessful. They fail to consider that their brands can be profoundly affected by extensions, acquisitions, distribution, product development, customer service, quality control, etc.—in other words, the entire list of disciplines that it takes to make a business.

“And many of the key decisions that determine whether the brand will thrive or fizzle are made when the people whose job it is to be conscious of the brand are not present. That is because many of those decisions are made by lawyers, accountants, salespeople and software engineers. Often the only person in the room looking out for the quality of the brand is the CEO. This means one thing: The safekeeping of the brand is the CEO’s responsibility. The buck stops there.”

—David F. D’Alessandro, CEO of John Hancock and author of “Brand Warfare: 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand”

http://www.womenentrepreneur.com/2009/10/branding-like-the-big-boys.html

That means establishing brand leadership for your company doesn’t start with the marketing department. It doesn’t start in research or product development. It starts in the executive suite.

It starts with a clear-eyed and powerful vision for what you can and will be the best in the world at doing, making or delivering. This is why visionary company leaders make great brand leaders. Steve Jobs at Apple comes to mind.

Without a strong brand champion—a firm hand on the tiller—all brands get diffused and dissipated. Remember what happened to Apple Computer after Richard Sculley (former head of Pepsi brought in to run the company) kicked founder Steve Jobs out? Apple drifted downward—producing mediocre product evolutions and licensing its operating system to second-rate cloners. After Jobs was recruited back to rescue the gasping company, Apple produced the iMac, the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone—a string of one revolutionary category-rocking product after another.

It put naysayers to shame by executing a successful retail strategy. Its stock caught fire again. All because one brilliant guy in a black turtleneck has a crystal clear idea of what Apple is—a company that exists only to deliver the simplest, most elegant, easily used consumer electronics in the world. (The fewer buttons the better, and especially on my shirts, thank you.)

Howard Schultz at Starbucks comes to mind. Schultz was about elevating the U.S. coffee consumer to an idealized experience he had enjoyed while touring Italy and sampling its neighborhood espresso bars. The Inspector General of The Geek Squad comes to mind. Robert Stephens knew a spoonful of humor would make the virus medicine go down and launched a business on the philosophy that even the “boring” businesses could be made interesting—even entertaining.

Each of these CEOs had a unique and powerful vision for what their companies were in the world to do. They operate from a North Star that guides and informs every decision. For Jobs, it was creating simple, elegant, esthetically pleasing technologies. Getting the computer to compute was simply the cost of entry. If it couldn’t be done with élan, don’t do it.

None of these CEOs started out with, “I’m going to build an iconic brand.” They said, “I’m going to create the best damn [fill in the blank] the world has ever seen.”

And it’s this paradox exactly that makes the CEO the most important and influential brand steward any organization can have. Next post:  what’s required of the CEO to steward the brand?

Key takeaways:
1. EVERYBODY gets on board or you don’t get convincing delivery of a powerful brand promise
2. Great brands start in the CEO’s office and cascade down from there

brand promise article

From a brand-naming perspective, the two products underscore a key concept I discuss in Branding Like The Big Boys…what makes a great brand name? A great brand name is simple, memorable, connotative and “sticky.”

“Kindle” has all this going for it. “Plastic Logic eReader” does not.

Time will tell whether the BN offer catches on. There are many pricing, distribution and brand-affinity issues that will influence the product’s success. The quality and usefulness of the product itself, as well as the variety of books in the digital store will matter. The name alone will not be the determining factor of whether eReader lives or dies.

But you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Consider:

Kindle: spark a flame, light a fire, “candle,” kinder, kindergarten, fire the imagination. The word provides a platform onto which Amazon can build all kinds of associations and emotional hooks and handles. It’s simple, quick, easy to say, easy to remember. It’s likeable too. Kindle has great brand thinking going for it.

eReader: well, read a digital book. Other than that it just lays there. Hard to build much emotional content or “stickiness” onto a word that’s so pedestrian and descriptive. Also, a bit undifferentiated from Sony’s “Reader.” (A Big Boy like Sony ought to do better than that!)

Plastic Logic: what the hell is that?

Nascent categories such as the electronic book marketplace make wonderful learning labs for all of us watching the development and deployment of new brands. More excitement will follow.

The fact is, this work is not brain surgery. It is, however, a discipline that requires consistent application, good instincts, a clearly defined position and some regular inputs of human and financial capital.

In Branding Like The Big Boys, I help you understand the theory and practice of effective brand development and activation. I give you tools for applying it in your own business. I point you toward some useful resources. And I give you sufficient basis that–even if you can’t do it all yourself–you are clear about the objectives, process and results you can expect.

You can download the first four chapters for free right now to get a sense of what’s in the book. Give it a shot and see how some of the largest, most successful companies can teach you some practical lessons in competing and winning.