Categories: Articles

Chief Executive Magazine Article: Top 25 Brand Leaders

Chief Executive Magazine – November 2004 cover story, Top 25 Brand Leaders – How The Smartest CEOs Build Their Brand. Hint: It Takes More Than Just Marketing. was recently made available online via BNET for free.
The nine page PDF is available for download here: Top 25 Brand Leaders: How The Smartest CEOs Build Their Brands. It does require a registration to the site but that is also free.
Here’s the overview:
“Many CEOs today are finding they must oversee brand management. Emerging from a period of scandal and recession, CEOs want to rev up top-line growth, and therefore getting the branding message right is critically important. They are determined to make sure their marketing departments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars with a hard eye on results. Other factors are that media choices have become ever more diverse with the arrival of the Internet and other digital media. Increasingly, good brand management is seen as an integral part of overall management.”
One of the more interesting key learnings appears on Page 27. In their “The Making Of A Brand Leader – How CEOs and CMOs define a CEO brand leader” graph on a scale of 0% – 80% “customer experience” ranks as the highest importance just ahead of “foresight and innovation” while at the bottom, “organizational structure” and “design” round out the least important factors.
Here is just one of many telling quotes from Top 25 Brand Leaders – How The Smartest CEOs Build Their Brand:
“Increasingly, good brand management is seen as an integral part of overall management.”
Now go grab your own copy and learn how companies like Dell, FedEx and JetBlue made the cut.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.