Few Brands last, Legendary Brands

For example, Krispy Kreme evokes such intense emotions among its doughnut fans that even the most time pressed consumers will stand in line to satisfy their physical and emotional cravings. But police officers aren’t the only ones drooling at the sight of the now famous green and white polka dot box. Many financial analysts missed the ground floor of stocks of companies like Krispy Kreme, Starbucks, and Wal Mart because they underestimated the impact of emotional connections between brands and customers and failed to see the relationship between these brands and the culture.

After a stint of insanity during the dot com heyday, the business world has again turned to more realistic views of corporate value, for the most part. Warren Buffett and like minded investors, whose focus was always on return on investment, earnings per share (EPS), earnings growth, dividends, and similar measures, can exhale-financial analysts have put renewed faith in the old time religion that equates the salvation of a firm with its profits, not its prophets. In this reborn truth lies the fundamental role of the brand: It is a mechanism to boost a firm’s sales and profits higher than those of its competitors’.

Legendary Bands, Legendary Brands Only a few brands last so long that they might be called legendary.

One of those is Wedgwood china, cited by brand historian Nancy Koehn in her article Brand New (Harvard Business School Press, 2001).

Dating back to the 1700s, this brand still leads the market in terms of closet share among the rich and famous, and tops the wish lists of brides to be around the globe. By no means exclusive to the world of products and commerce, legends abound in the music world. From Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (whose music has transcended the centuries) to Al Jolson, Glenn Miller, and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong (who crossed racial barriers and defined an era of music), artists have connected deeply with people and helped to shape culture.