Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity

11 Achieving an Iconic Brand

Big, enduring brands become icons—not just of corporations, but of whole cultures. Coca-Cola not only has the most recognized brand logo in the world, but the logo also has become a symbol of Western way of life.

—Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson¹

The creation of an iconic brand is one of the ultimate achievements in a career spent in pursuit of innovation, agility, and excellence.

Brand building is also a critical task for the revolutionary leader, since creating a magnetic brand may be as essential to your success in communicating with colleagues as it is in communicating your vision, commitment, and even the performance of your innovations to customers. Without a properly tuned brand, great innovations often languish unrecognized in the marketplace, and thus branding is as essential to innovation as ideating and even research.

Brands are not just promises to the customer; they're also promises to ourselves. They are mirrors that we hold up before ourselves, mirrors in which we examine ourselves to see who we really are. As we learned in previous chapters, knowing who we are is critical in determining whom we would like to become.

Because “becoming” is all about what we create and innovate, we embrace the proposition that innovation and branding are two sides of a single coin.

We've already discussed the importance of ethnography as a method ...