The brand strategy toolkit: The ‘As Opposed To’ test

Sixty-three of the companies in the FTSE100 include at least one of the following in their list of corporate values: integrity, respect, customer-centricity, innovation and excellence.

Deepak Chopra apparently once said that “mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.”

About five years ago, I came to almost the opposite conclusion about marketing, which more often than not expresses values that reflect the commonplace, including obviousness, short-sightedness, cliché and utter banality.

Like a lot of brand consultants, I spend much of my time looking through company websites and annual reports. I’m not going to pretend I read them top to bottom, but I pay a decent amount of attention to the sections where organisations list the values they use...

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