Dec 9, 2019
My final guest for season three of the podcast is Denise Lee
Yohn, author of the bestseller, What Great Brands Do: The
Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the
Rest. She's also an in-demand keynote speaker, and has
appeared on CNBC, Fox Business, NPR, and in the Wall
Street Journal discussing business and branding
issues.
Denise cut her teeth in lead strategy roles for the advertising
agencies behind campaigns for Burger King and Land Rover, and has
held client-side positions at Jack In The Box and Sony.
On this episode, Denise and I talk about the relationship between
brand and business, why it's important to "sweat the small stuff,"
brand experience versus employee experience, and her latest
book, Fusion: How Integrating
Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest
Companies.
I kicked off the conversation with a question about the
relationship between brand and business, something I've been
interested in since writing an article on the
topic for The Guardian in 2014. Denise
and I agree that business leaders need to stop thinking of brand
and business (or brand strategy and business strategy, at least) as
two separate things. They are "one and the same," to use Denise's
words.
Next, we talked about one of the seven "brand-building principles"
from her book, What Great Brands Do. According
to the book, great brands "Sweat the Small Stuff." Denise explains
that the process she recommends for achieving this goal and
introduces one of the free tools she's
created, the Brand Touchpoint Wheel.
Later in the conversation, Denise and I talked about her latest
book, Fusion, which explores the relationship
between culture and brand. While she does not recommend creating
employer brand platforms (partly because they create an unnecessary
divide between the external and internal-facing brand), she does
recommend working on the employee experience using a similar
approach to that used for customer brand experience. The Brand
Touchpoint Wheel can again prove useful when working on the
employee experience, as can another tool Denise offers, the Employee
Experience Architecture Framework.
As usual, we wrapped up the conversation with Denise's book
recommendations and advice for junior/aspiring branding
professionals. You won't want to miss it!
To learn more about Denise, visit deniseleeyohn.com. On her site, you'll
find information about her books, speaking engagements, and
consulting practice, as well as her blog, and more free,
downloadable tools like the ones we mentioned in our conversation.
You can also find and follow Denise on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.