Branding: How to Be Insanely Great

It’s been interesting absorbing all the interviews and commentary about Steve Jobs since his passing. His accomplishments, quotes, lessons learned and look on life are all fascinating. I resonate with many of his principles — e.g., follow your curiosity and intuition; think differently; fail forward; connect the dots; innovate your way out of problems; stay hungry; stay foolish; and it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important. As a brand builder, merchant and creative strategist, what spoke to me most was his idea of wanting to do “insanely great” work.

I often collaborate with clients to create brand and product fit charts (or road maps) to help their teams define the essence of their brand’s positioning. These fit charts become companies’ guardrails and help leaders make decisions that are unique to their brand — not their competitor’s. The charts help guide businesses when considering new categories, ventures and services. Fit charts generally contain seven adjectives or phrases to 10 adjectives or phrases that paint a top-level, brand-differentiating picture which provides a quick glimpse into a brand’s personality and what makes it tick.

Insanely great is what Jobs dubbed his original Mac, which sold for a cool $2,495. A bold and audacious statement about a bold and audacious product. True to Apple’s simple but profound world view, insanely great became the retailer’s brand and product fit chart. Those two powerful words became Apple’s execution bar. When Jobs unveiled his products to the world (e.g., iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad), they couldn’t be just good or great, they had to be insanely great. Renowned business consultant Jim Collins encourages companies to go from “good to great.” Jobs routinely pushed way past that.

Nearly three decades later, insanely great are still top-of-mind words at Apple. Tim Cook, Apple’s new CEO, shared this at Jobs’ company memorial: “Steve never followed the herd. He thought deeply about almost everything and was the most unconventional thinker I have ever known. He always did what he thought was right, not what was easy. He never accepted merely good. He would only accept great — insanely great.”

What’s your brand accomplished this year that would classify it as insanely great? What first pops into your mind? In honor of Jobs, if you took an “insanely great inventory,” what would you find as you looked across all your channels, your various customer touchpoints, thousands of SKUs, personalized services and never-ending stream of social media strategies? What’s been insanely great for your brand this year?

Adapting Your Brand to Today’s Ever-Changing Business Environment
Being insanely great in today’s hyperspeed, attention-deficit business world is indeed a challenge. You’re pulled in a thousand different directions putting out fires, skimming surfaces, giving five minutes (or less) of thought to strategic problems, firing off responses to colleagues’ emails … all before 9 a.m. This pace encourages you to default to what you’ve always done, to preserve the status quo. Exactly the opposite of Jobs’ approach.

When do you find time to think insanely great thoughts? Other business leaders have coined words that express “insanely great” in slightly different ways — e.g., craveworthy, swoonworthy, lovemarks, gaspworthy. Perhaps your brand resonates more with one of these. Maybe you need to create your own version. What matters is the intention and goals set behind these words. The culture to innovate, the desire to risk, the fascination to create something as Jobs said “so perfect that customers cannot refuse it.”

In his famous commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs told the graduates: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Don’t settle.”

3 Tips to Becoming Insanely Great
Want to jump-start the process of becoming insanely great? Before 2011 is over, take three one-hour breaks and do the following:

1. Conduct a multichannel insanely great audit across all your brand touchpoints. Have your team list its top three accomplishments in each channel/functional area. Share them with everyone in the company, then vote on the single best insanely great activity of the year. Reward that behavior.

2. Perform the same type of insanely great audit on your competition. Share the findings with your team. Then ask, “Why didn’t we do that?”

3. Perform the same type of insanely great audit outside of your industry. Share the findings with your team. Then ask, “How can we borrow from these discoveries?”

Consumers are counting on you to figure this out. Don’t settle. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Make Steve Jobs proud.

Andrea Syverson is president of IER Partners, a strategic consulting company specializing in brand and merchandising directions. Reach Andrea at asyverson@ierpartners.com.