Who we (I am) are.
The world’s best brands transform their customers into passionate brand advocates. How do they do it? How do companies create such strong affection for their brands that their customers are compelled to become active brand champions? Does the phenomenon happen on its own? Is there a secret to help it along?
This has been my area of study and work for over 25 years. I did this work in my role at the iconic brand Patagonia around the turn of the century. I started a consultancy based on this work in 2006. I wrote the seminal book on the subject, which was published in 2015, and started a company (Compass and Nail) at the same time to help more businesses become great brands. And, most recently, launched a software platform in 2020 to help even more businesses. In 2022, it all culminated in the first and only index to measure brand advocacy, The Brand Equity Index.
“Relationships are fuzzy, not easily measured, and they mean different things to different people. Marketers talk about them, but few businesses treat them as strategic assets. Walk into a boardroom, and you can get a long way talking about income statements, P&L, CapEx, and ROI. Talk about relationships, and few people want to listen, especially if the business isn’t doing well. When challenged, there’s not yet any way to point to the value of relationships in an organization’s financials because the value is spread throughout all of the statements. It doesn’t feel real, but it’s encapsulated everywhere a company does business. Relationships don’t seem real or concrete enough to act upon. They’re seen as a byproduct of other activities, something that happens on their own as long as you take care of other things.”
Well Steve, measuring relationships and their value isn’t fuzzy anymore. The Brand Equity Index quantifies exactly how well a business creates relationships. For the first time, business leaders can understand the performance of all of their company’s collective efforts in an index that correlates what a company does with how efficient brand advocacy (aka relationship) is formed. With that understanding in hand, deliberate, delineated steps to improve become evident, shining light on the otherwise “fuzzy,” albeit most valuable, part of business.
Craig Wilson, Entrepreneur, Author, Coach, and Loyalty Architect
Craig Wilson’s been referred to as an alchemist, a savant, and a pain in the ass. A self-proclaimed “empirical anthropologist,” Craig’s breakthrough was penning a 5-year strategic plan for Patagonia that catapulted the brand to $1B. Craig’s mission is to make the world a more empathic place, one business at a time. He is the author of The Compass and the Nail, the creator of The Brand Ecosystem Model, and the architect of The Brand Equity Index.