Be Your Own Brand—A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd

The Soul of a Brand

The genius of McDonald's is creating a recognizable set of distinctive, relevant, and consistent competencies, and building a business on it for a target market—families with children. When you take your children to a fancy restaurant, you will not infrequently find that they somehow think they're in a Grimm's fairy tale and you're trying to poison them. They don't care how many awards the cuisine has won. You can hear their refrain as you read this: “Have we ever had this before?” Under the Golden Arches—or in any of the host of familiar places built along similar lines—that question almost never comes up.

Yet thirty years ago, if a budding Wall Street wizard had said, “I'm going to put your money into a company in an exacting, ...