什么是品牌理想？
IDEAL (i-de’al), n. 1. The key to unlock the code for twentyfirst century business success. 2. The only sustainable way to recruit, unite, and motivate all the people a business touches, from employees to customers. 3. The most powerful lever a business leader can use to achieve competitive advantage. 4. A business’s essential reason for being, the higher-order benefit it brings to the world. 5. The factor connecting the core beliefs of the people inside a business with the fundamental human values of the people they serve. 6. Not social responsibility or altruism, but a program for profit and growth based on improving people’s lives.
卓越企业遵循的五项准则（必做的五件事）：
Discover a brand ideal of improving people’s lives in one of fi ve fi elds of fundamental human values.
Build their organizational culture around the brand ideal.
Communicate the brand ideal to engage employees and customers.
Deliver a near- ideal customer experience.
Evaluate their progress and people against the brand ideal.
品牌理想树（Ideal Tree）各模块概述：
Discover
Uncover your brand purpose
Every business in the world has a potential growth-driving ideal at its center. You discover an ideal for a business by finding a link between its central reason for being, the core beliefs of its people, including senior leadership, and the fundamental values of customer.
While most businesses articulate a vision and a strategy, they often have not articulated—and activated—this is terms of a life-improving ideal. A Brand Ideal drives growth by inspiring employees and business partners to innovate and to perform at the highest levels.
The best Brand Ideals embody at least one of the five fundamental human values identified by Jim Stengel——
Eliciting Joy: Activating experiences of happiness, wonder, and limitless possibility
Enabling Connection: Enhancing the ability of people to connect with each other and the world in meaningful ways
Inspiring Exploration: Helping people explore new horizons and new experiences
Evoking Pride: Giving people increased confidence, strength, security, and vitality
Impacting Society: Affecting society broadly, from challenging the status quo to redefining categories
The most successful leaders express their Ideal explicitly, and often, with all stakeholders.
Define
Identify your unique selling proposition
Every business must be rooted in a clear understanding of how it achieves competitive advantage. To define this, you need to answer some strategic questions:
What category do you compete in?
Who are your primary competitors?
Who do you serve?
What benefit do you offer that emanates from your Ideal?
What are your essential points of difference vs. your rivals?
Where must you maintain competitive equality (points of parity)?
Answering these questions is critical to ideals-inspired brand building.
Build
Build an organizational culture around your Brand Ideal
Culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage. Inspiring and energizing people to work toward a common ideal can unleash their full potential. Leadership must set the tone for what they stand for and be clear about it, both internally and externally. All of your actions communicate culture.
10 “Culture Builders” unlock growth in people and business:
Reveal your inspirational Ideal and operationalize it
Be clear about what you stand for, inside and outside the company
Design your organization for what it needs to win
Get your team right and do it quickly
Champion innovation of all kinds
Set your standards very high
Train all the time
Do a few symbolic things to create excitement
Think like a winner. Act like a winner.
Live your desired legacy
When the culture is on track, aligned with an ideal of improving people’s lives, the business soars. Evolving and improving your culture is a continuous process.
Communicate
Communicate your Ideal to engage employees and customers
The fastest growing, most profitable and most innovative businesses share a common thread: high-quality communication. Every communication, large or small, expresses and supports their brand ideal.
Effective strategies for Ideals-based communication must focus on the following:
Internal communication—employee communications, internal conversations, memos, and reports; business cards, office stationery, and email signature blocks
External communication—logos, product claims, advertising, investor, customer, and consumer communication via traditional, digital, and social media channels
Measurement—Measure the impact of your communications
Clear guidance—provide your communications partners with effective briefs for every assignment
Deliver
Provide a near-ideal customer experience
Everything your business does comes together with the Ideals-inspired experience you provide to customers. The brand experience is not only your product or service but how people learn about it, buy it, use it, live with it, and share the quality of the experience with others.
These principles are the foundation of creating ideals-inspired customer experiences time after time:
Start with the Ideal
Make innovation personal
Collaborate widely
Build a portfolio of innovations
Establish a process for innovation
The more you strive to improve people’s lives and the more you demonstrate that in your products and services and all your interactions, the more customers will reward you by becoming loyal advocates for your business.
Evaluate
Measure the impact of your Brand Ideal
Measuring what matters is one of the simple, yet complicated, truths at the heart of business success. Many flounder by focusing on financial measures only. They ignore or lose sight of vital measures of employee and customer engagement with the business—the things that ultimately determine its ongoing financial health.
The following criteria for evaluation and measurement are essential for sustained growth:
Measure your progress against your Ideal with all stakeholders
Define your key performance measures
Measure your people against your ideal
Measure and reward time spent with customers and end consumers
Ideals-based businesses outperform competitors and increase their brand value because their ideal of improving people’s lives serves as a GPS device for gauging progress toward long-term goals.
题外话：这本书，整体感觉，估计成不了什么气候，这种理论很难说服急功近利的企业主。个人感觉如果能够和“定位”或其他品牌建设理论融合，例如真正“定位”的其实是能够影响消费者的理想之类的，可能会更好一些。当然，个人拙见，呵呵一笑。