What makes a brand truly Visionary?
Product, Innovation, Culture, Marketing?
It is a harmonious blending of product, marketing, and a passionate culture. Along with a visionary who establishes and commits themselves and the brand to ageless foundational principles. What formula has sustained iconic brands such as; Apple, Nike, adidas, and allowed them to maintain their vision and brand ETHOS for generations?
How does one brand lose its premium status, while others thrive generation to generation?
The Visionary Brand explores the core of these generational companies, and how they have evolved to become visionaries. This definitive guide to preserving authentic success through identifying, protecting, and nurturing the brands core foundational principles will be a timeless leadership resource. Both professionally and personally, serving a purpose from start-up through established category leaders.
Most brands at some point lose sight of their vision or have not established their brand core ETHOS. The Visionary Brand will revitalize those who are not yet evangelizing their brand's values and principles, along with guiding those who have yet to define their foundation. To succeed, you must understand who you are, what value you are providing, where you are positioning, and how to engage with your loyal community and brand team. From aspirational, real-life scenarios, to inspirational guidance, The Visionary Brand will provide ongoing support to successfully drive your brand forward.
The Visionary Brand outlines the independent elements to emulating and successfully executing this foundational strategy.
Define your vision and build a Foundational Principles platform.
Stick to your vision while capturing global market share from your competitors. Create a continuous Pipeline of Innovation.
Establish a Culture of Passionate followers.
Engage, and build Loyalty.
Embrace the changing tide of the new age adoption curve.
Be an Artist, be yourself, and instill the courage to accomplish your Vision.
There may be Visionary brands, but no one company exists as The Visionary Brand, while some have most, none have all.
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: The Visionary Brand clearly and cleverly explains what constitutes a successful, long-lasting brand, and covers essential topics like the loyalty loop, the drawdown pipeline, and cannibalization. The work may benefit from an even broader perspective on what constitutes a visionary leader.
Prose: Smeltzer's prose is consistently inspiring, motivating, and precise. Bolding important terms and distilling ideas down into basic statements helps to get the text's points across.
Originality: The Visionary Brand offers a unique perspective on what makes certain brands long-lasting and iconic. Smeltzer's book provides a pertinent focus on diversity, values leadership, and how to engage in our new age.
Character Development/Execution: Smeltzer is highly qualified to pen this text. The metaphors and graphics employed to explain the book's points are always clarifying.
Date Submitted: December 07, 2021
4 STAR REVIEW:
"This is a nice read to know what is behind the visionary brand. Every brand has a base product that made them successful when they forget that they lose their focus and face failures even may close their company. Having a Vision and focus and good marketing and making your customers happy is important.
If you want to make your customer happy, first take care of your employees, motivate and reward them, acknowledge their work so they will take care of the rest.
The book describes how a brand came to be successful and a forerunner and changing based on the changes in technology and people.
The book is written is a simple way without any technical jargon. I liked it."
“The Visionary Brand outlines what it takes to build a true, authentic Visionary brand. It provides actionable insight and entertaining case studies that can support you in taking your brand to the next level and beyond!”
The Visionary Brand: The Success Formula Behind the Worlds Most Visionary Brands belongs in any business collection focused on branding success, and makes a case for fostering a visionary, market-driving force that achieves through innovation and inspiration.
From product visions and engagement choices to creating a disruptive, different brand that stands out from the crowd, Bryan Smeltzer provides a series of admonitions that cover the processes of a successful formula for transformation and change.
Common business book approaches such as discussions of positioning and market-driven processes thus receive a unique approach that turns tradition on end to look at new results and how to achieve, foster, and promote different forms of vision and success.
Smeltzer adopts a problem-solving approach in his discussions that draws on many real-world examples from the start. One example is his survey of how Oakley, a successful eyewear brand, was missing the boat on expanding their vision to related products.
That there are no easy answers to pursing this vision is supported in the Oakley example that introduces The Visionary Brand, where "Oakley’s little problem became a much bigger problem—one that would alienate some of their core community and drive the entire brand culture in a different direction. Both category authenticity and channel distribution would quickly become problems whereas they hadn’t been before. Oakley began to lose its cultural direction, as well as those loyal brand ambassadors who stuck with the brand through its evolution over the decades. They had loved and embraced the brand for what it was, not what it was becoming."
What went wrong? As their success story becomes one that threatens to crash and burn, Smeltzer follows the process whereby the company changed in a different direction before all was lost.
This and other examples explore visions gone awry as well as those which reached for the sky and found the stars, providing compelling insights that business readers and innovators alike will find both thought-provoking and inspirational.
What makes for "a truly visionary brand as opposed to one that loses its way" lies at the heart of these discussions, which encourage visionary thinkers to not just identify visionary qualities and pursuits, but understand what leads to success and what threatens failure.
Smeltzer's three decades in business lend a practical, real-world side to his theories and visions. These help fellow business visionaries understand the foundations of identifying what elements are involved in a successful visionary brand.
From pricing and promoting revolutionary products to integrating a product strategy that embraces short- and long-term visions, Smeltzer's approach offers business thinkers new ways of branding and envisioning their goals.
Business collections will find his book specific and filled with opportunities that visionary thinkers will find enlightening and inspirational, grounded in the nuts and bolts of real-world experience.
5 STAR REVIEW:
“This book is both: inspiring and practical. It covers visionary brand concepts and how to achieve success in building one. I got a feeling that a strong and visionary brand is closely connected to the company you are built, it's culture, attractiveness to customers and how customers associate themselves with company's solutions, become ambassadors and promoters of the brand they love and are loyal to.”
5 STAR REVIEW:
“The Visionary Brand is suitable for the general reading audience. Exploring the concept of a ‘Visionary’ brand, the book explores the building blocks that successful brands have used to create a vision for their products, a consistent presentation of that vision across the years, and a culture of loyal and engaged followers. With a focus on authenticity, creativity, and building a brand based on ethics and principles, the book aims to provide a practical framework for studying successful real-world cases to see what lessons smaller brands can learn.”
“This book on business concepts encourages the reader to aim big with their ambitions and follows through on this with the tools to achieve those ambitions. Bryan Smeltzer’s approach to understanding what makes successful brands work is both comprehensive and accessible.”
“I’m confident that readers of his work will be able to take the insight they gain from this book and apply it to their own brands. Encompassing both the macro and micro styles of thinking about brand management, The Visionary Brand is an essential tool for setting the short and long-term goals that will lead your organization to great success in the future.”
“Overall, I would strongly recommend this book to those in a position of leadership in business who wish to understand how to take their organization to a new level of customer engagement.”
“Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, The Visionary Brand must be considered essential reading for all aspiring entrepreneurs and corporate executives seeking to expand their market share.”
“The Visionary Brand is unreservedly recommended for community, corporate, college, university library Business Management instructional reference collections, and for the personal reading lists of entrepreneurs, MBA students, and corporate executives.”
Midwest Book Review, James Cox, Editor-in-Chief
5 STAR REVIEW:
“The Visionary Brand explains how to use branding and innovative products to help your business grow.”
“I thought The Visionary Brand was very informative. I loved how it used an orchestra for an analogy to explain the process of creation, and how it talked about branding first, then products, and even about your life outside of business. Most people do not talk about the latter. I thought that was refreshing.
I really liked how the book used well-known companies like Apple and Nike to show how they stayed on top of their game. I thought the graphics were a nice touch, and I really loved the quotes, especially from Vincent Van Gogh.”
“I liked how Bryan gave definitions to certain words and mentioned other books to read if you need more information. My favorite part was how he motivates you at the end with each summary. I think this book would be great for any entrepreneur as well as large companies. If you need some insight and motivation to start a company or to help your company, then I highly recommend reading The Visionary Brand.”
5 STAR REVIEW:
“Mr. Smeltzer's book on The Visionary Brand is a welcome, real-world overview of how a brand manager is an '...orchestra leader...' and I can't wait to share this title with my students in my branding classes.”
5 STAR REVIEW:
“A great mix of inspiration and practical advice on brand building and business in general, would recommend!”
5 STAR REVIEW:
The Visionary Brand: The Success Formula Behind the World’s Most Visionary Brands opens with an interesting case study about Oakley and how it almost lost its cultural direction as a brand and regained its footing by re-aligning its brand identity. Author Bryan Smeltzer shares his three decades in the business from founding his own company and to being involved in executive-level roles with some of the world’s most iconic brands. His book points out that many in the business believe that product, marketing, culture, and innovation are good starting points in creating a visionary brand, but they need to be an integral part of your brand’s foundation to make it work and must be upheld throughout your brand’s entry into the world. It incorporates elements of a successful formula that includes not only positioning but also what is called the Power Triad, culture matrix, and how to navigate the ecosystem that will be your brand’s habitat. It is your chance to take a glimpse into how competitive brands sustain their huge hold on their target market.
Visionary branding is a powerful tool for aligning a product’s identity in the development of strategic competitive advantage. The Visionary Brand could not have come at a more opportune time. It is an idea that is timeless and will prove indispensable for as long as companies and their brands are jousting for the competitive edge in the market. If there is anything that Bryan Smeltzer’s case studies and easy-to-digest style of writing have taught me, it is that paying attention to the literature on visionary branding will help companies not only to focus on their core values and identity, but it will also increase their responsiveness to change. While reading this book, I can’t help but remember the tragedy of Blackberry, HTC, and Nokia. The Visionary Brand is highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn how a brand retains a strong recall and avoids the pitfalls of obscurity.
