Living the Brand
PDVSA Leadership Symposium, Caracas, Venezuela, 23 September 2002

Successful brands are about imagination. These are the organisations that inspire us to work for them, to buy their products and services and to recommend them to others. These are the organisations we feel emotional about; the brands that we trust. Yet stimulating imagination among employees and customers is hard. In this presentation, Nicholas Ind uses examples such as Nike, Nordstrom and Patagonia to demonstrate how memorable and powerful ideas can be a source of innovation. He then goes on to show how to define the essence of an organisation and to build employee involvement and commitment to it. The companies that succeed at this, benefit in terms of higher productivity, enhanced financial performance and greater intellectual capital – the real battleground for business competition.