Twenty years ago, Branding Strategy Insider began with a straightforward ambition: create a place where people serious about building brands could find thinking that made them better at it.
I could not have imagined then what BSI would become.
Twenty years later, BSI reaches tens of thousands of brand and business leaders each month, supported by more than 60,000 subscribers and a global community built around thousands of ideas about how brands compete, grow and create value.
A great deal has changed since we launched in 2006.
Facebook was two years old. The iPhone did not exist. Twitter had barely launched. Google was still primarily a search engine. Artificial intelligence belonged more to science fiction than to the everyday work of marketers.
No creator economies, TikTok strategies, generative AI platforms, or algorithms mediated nearly every stage of customer discovery and choice.
But the fundamental challenges facing brand leaders were remarkably familiar.
How do you create something people value? How do you differentiate it? How do you articulate why you are worth choosing? How do you build an organization capable of delivering what the brand promises? And, ultimately, how does brand contribute to the performance and value of the business?
Those questions animated Branding Strategy Insider when we began. Twenty years later, they remain at the center of our work.
Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
Branding did not begin in 2006, and neither did the ideas that shaped BSI.
From the beginning, I wanted Branding Strategy Insider to connect today’s practitioners with the people whose thinking created the foundations beneath our discipline.
David Ogilvy helped introduce generations of marketers to the power of brand image and the idea that every communication contributes to the long-term character of a brand.
Bill Bernbach demonstrated that strategy and creativity were not opposing forces. First find something important to say. Then find an original, memorable, and persuasive way to say it.
Peter Drucker pushed all of us to see marketing in the larger context of management, customers, innovation, and organizational purpose. BSI has had the privilege of sharing Drucker’s thinking through our relationship with the Drucker Institute.
The thinking of Leo Burnett, Rosser Reeves, Theodore Levitt, Michael Porter, and other foundational voices has also echoed through BSI’s pages. Philip Kotler, one of the architects of modern marketing, contributed directly to BSI, exploring the relationship between brand strength, growth, profitability, reputation, and a changing marketplace.
We have revisited their ideas because enduring principles deserve to be tested against new realities. A discipline that forgets its history risks mistaking novelty for progress. The newest idea is not necessarily the best, and an old idea is not obsolete because it is old.
The Thinkers Who Built BSI With Us
Over time, Branding Strategy Insider became much more than a place for The Blake Project‘s thinking.
It became a platform for some of the most important voices in brand and marketing strategy.
One of the great privileges of my career was knowing Jack Trout.
Jack, the co-originator of positioning, became both a contributor to BSI and my mentor. He had an extraordinary ability to cut through layers of complexity and force leaders to confront the question underneath all the other questions:
What idea do you own in the mind?
His intellectual partner Al Ries brought equally consequential thinking about positioning, categories, focus, and the competitive dynamics that determine which brands win.
David Aaker’s pioneering work on brand equity helped elevate brand from something marketers communicated to something businesses could understand as an asset. His thinking about architecture, categories, and growth continues to influence how leaders manage brands and portfolios.
But BSI has never been shaped by one school of thought.
Byron Sharp, author of How Brands Grow, brought one of the most consequential challenges to conventional brand thinking of the past two decades. His evidence-based work on penetration, mental and physical availability, and distinctive assets forced marketers to reconsider long-held assumptions about loyalty, differentiation, and how brands grow.
Dr. Martina Olbertova expanded the conversation into meaning, semiotics, and cultural relevance. Her work reminds us that brands do more than identify products or communicate messages; they create and carry meaning, and they become vulnerable when that meaning loses relevance or coherence.
Martin Lindstrom pushed further into sensory branding, behavioral influence and the often-unconscious forces affecting customer choice, while Mark Ritson has consistently challenged marketers to take research, segmentation, targeting, positioning and strategy seriously—and to distinguish enduring marketing discipline from whatever happens to be fashionable.
Bec Brideson challenged another deeply embedded set of assumptions: the way marketers understand women, purchasing power, and the female economy. Her work demonstrated how inherited perspectives can obscure opportunity—and why diversity of viewpoint is not peripheral to growth, but often essential to seeing markets more clearly.
Other influential voices widened the conversation further. Seth Godin explored meaning, attention, and how ideas spread. Malcolm Gladwell brought cultural and behavioral perspectives to choice. Robert Cialdini connected the science of persuasion to marketing. Jean-Noël Kapferer challenged conventional brand thinking through his pioneering work on luxury. Les Binet brought evidence about effectiveness and the tension between short- and long-term performance. And Laura Ries continued the conversation around positioning, categories, focus and competition.
BSI has also benefited from leaders who brought the perspective of having been inside some of the world’s most consequential brands.
John Sculley, former CEO of Pepsi-Cola and Apple, wrote from direct experience about disruption, customer insight, pricing, innovation and the discipline required to build value through periods of profound change. He also joined us as the featured leader of our 2013 Brand Strategy Un-Conference, giving participants the opportunity to explore those ideas with him firsthand.
And Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former chief evangelist and one of the most influential voices in entrepreneurship and innovation, was among BSI’s earliest featured contributors. In 2007, he became the first of a series of guest authors invited to share their thinking with our readers. His contributions explored branding, meaning, memorable ideas, and the way ideas spread and endure.
Positioning. Equity. Availability. Meaning. Culture. Trust. Growth. Innovation. Customer behavior.
The value of BSI has been in bringing consequential thinkers into the same conversation—and giving practitioners the opportunity to decide what each perspective contributes to the problem in front of them.
And then there was Larry Light.
Larry was one of the most prolific and consequential thinkers ever to contribute to Branding Strategy Insider. He brought the perspective of someone who had led marketing for one of the world’s most recognizable brands (McDonald’s) and spent his career challenging conventional approaches to brand management.
Over four years alone, Larry contributed approximately 150 articles to BSI. His ideas around brand journalism, relevance, trust, and enduring profitable growth continue to influence our pages today.
We did not lose his thinking.
That is another role a publication like BSI can play.
Ideas can outlive the people who gave them to us.
That breadth of thinking matters because the practice of branding has expanded.
The brand is not only what marketing says. It is what leadership decides. It is what employees experience. It is what customers encounter. It is what the organization values, rewards, and delivers. And it is increasingly what the business proves through its actions.
Across thousands of articles, contributors including Kevin Roberts, Joan Kiddon, Jerome Conlon, David Stewart, Mark Di Somma, Paul Bailey, Darren Coleman, Anne Bahr Thompson, Geoff Colon, Dan White, Tom Asacker, Andrea Learned, Walker Smith, Chris Wren, Tom Goodwin, Steve Wunker, Paul Friederichsen, Tim Sutton, Nigel Hollis, Patrick Hanlon, Emmanuel Probst, Martin Roll, Rishad Tobaccowala, Bill Baker, Niraj Dawar, Kate Newlin, Scott Galloway, and many others have helped BSI examine these questions from very different perspectives.
The value has never been that all of these people agree. They don’t.
That may be one of BSI’s greatest strengths.
The People Who Were There
One of BSI’s most valuable roles has been preserving brand history through the people who actually made it. We have been able to move beyond retrospective case studies and hear directly from people who were inside the room when iconic brand ideas were created.
When people debate Apple’s legendary “Think Different” campaign, they often tell the story through Steve Jobs.
On BSI, Rob Siltanen, Creative Director and managing partner at TBWA\Chiat\Day who worked directly on the Apple pitch, gave readers his own account of what happened.
Siltanen took readers inside the pitch, the development of the idea, the disagreements with Jobs, the origin of “Think Different” and the creation of the “Crazy Ones” script.
It remains one of the most extraordinary pieces we have published because it allows marketers to see the uncertainty, argument, judgment, and collaboration behind work that history now makes look inevitable.
Jerome Conlon, Nike’s Director of Marketing Insights & Planning during the period that gave birth to “Just Do It,” shared the internal strategic conversations and brand brief that helped set the conditions for one of the most enduring ideas in marketing history.
Rather than starting with the famous line, Conlon started with the problem.
Nike was under pressure. Reebok was growing. Nike’s relevance needed to extend beyond a narrow definition of serious male athletes.
The brand needed a larger idea.
Readers could see how consumer insight, culture, brand purpose, competitive pressure, and strategy preceded the creative work that followed.
Then there is “I’m Lovin’ It.”
Larry Light gave BSI readers his first-person account of taking over as Global CMO of McDonald’s when the brand was struggling with declining relevance, poor morale, and eroding trust.
The story was much larger than the creation of a slogan.
Larry described the reinvention of McDonald’s marketing approach, his rejection of mass marketing in favor of a more multidimensional strategy, the development of Brand Journalism, the global search for ideas, and the work required to rebuild trust in one of the world’s most visible brands.
“I’m Lovin’ It” became the outward expression of something much deeper happening inside the business.
And through Tom Murry, who served as CEO of Calvin Klein for 17 years, BSI readers received a rare first-person account of what it took to protect and grow one of the world’s most iconic fashion brands.
Murry took readers inside Calvin Klein during a defining period that included the company’s acquisition by PVH in 2003. He described working directly with Calvin Klein, the fierce commitment to design and quality that shaped the brand, and the constant tension between protecting brand equity and pursuing commercial growth.
His account offered an important lesson: building an extraordinary brand requires more than creating demand. It requires the discipline to protect what makes the brand valuable—even when financial pressures make compromise tempting. During Murry’s tenure, Calvin Klein grew dramatically, but he wrote that he would have considered himself a failure if that growth had come at the expense of the brand itself.
These stories matter to me.
Because brand history tends to compress messy human processes into neat case studies.
A campaign becomes a slogan.
A strategy becomes a framework.
A turnaround becomes a chart.
But that isn’t how breakthroughs actually happen.
They happen through disagreement, insight, conviction, risk, failure, persistence, and the willingness of people to see something others cannot yet see.
One of the roles BSI can play is preserving those stories before they disappear.
A Place For Ideas, Not An Ideology
The diversity of voices on Branding Strategy Insider reflects another conviction I have developed over these 20 years: brand strategy is weakened when it becomes a contest between competing doctrines.
Differentiation, distinctiveness, mental availability, meaning, culture, experience, and loyalty all offer useful ways of understanding how brands create advantage. The problem begins when any one of them is treated as the universal answer.
Our role has never been to narrow the field to a single framework. It has been to make the conversation more useful by exposing readers to strong ideas, competing evidence, and different ways of seeing the same problem.
Because good practitioners need more than principles.
They need judgment.
They need to understand competing ideas, recognize when each is useful, and know when a familiar answer is inadequate for the problem in front of them.
Some ideas reinforce one another. Others challenge one another. And some make us reconsider what we once believed.
That is how a discipline advances.
Brand Has Become A Bigger Business Conversation
Perhaps the most important change I have witnessed over these 20 years is not in branding itself, but in the role brand must play inside the enterprise.
For too long, branding was reduced to identity, communications, and campaigns. Those things matter of course, but they represent only part of the work.
Brand influences how clearly a business is understood, how confidently customers choose it, how consistently employees deliver its promise, and how much preference, trust, and pricing power it can sustain over time. Done well, it reduces friction, strengthens competitive advantage, and creates value that extends far beyond marketing.
And eventually, those effects show up in the economics of the business.
That is why I increasingly believe: Brand strategy and business strategy must be one strategy.
The questions we should be asking have become correspondingly larger:
- Where is brand helping—or hurting—growth?
- Are we clearly articulating why we are valuable and worth choosing?
- Does our positioning create meaningful preference?
- Are we making the customer’s decision easier?
- Does our culture enable our people to consistently deliver the brand promise?
- Are we creating pricing power or conditioning customers to wait for a discount?
- Is our brand architecture creating clarity or adding complexity?
- Are we measuring brand in ways that connect to business outcomes?
- Where can brand create new growth, revenue, and enterprise value?
These questions do not belong exclusively to marketers.
They belong in the leadership conversation.
That is increasingly where BSI intends to take them.
What Twenty Years Has Taught Me
Publishing and working with thousands of ideas about brands has reinforced a few convictions.
Brands Are Never Finished
Markets move.
Culture changes.
Competitors emerge.
Technologies rewrite expectations.
Customers learn.
What made a brand relevant yesterday can become the source of its complacency tomorrow.
I have often described brands as a river, not a pond.
They remain themselves while constantly moving.
Clarity Becomes More Valuable As Noise Grows
The world has become vastly more complicated since 2006, and brands have responded by producing vastly more communication. But more information does not necessarily create more understanding. In many cases, it creates more noise.
Customers still need clarity.
They need to understand what a brand is, why it matters, what makes it valuable, and why it is worth choosing. Brands that answer those questions well reduce the friction of choice. Those that cannot often compensate with more messaging, more promotion, and more spending.
The Brand Promise Has To Survive The Organization
But clarity cannot exist only in the marketplace. It also has to exist inside the organization.
A promise made by marketing but contradicted by the organization is not much of a brand promise. What a company values, rewards, tolerates, and enables eventually reaches the customer. Culture determines whether the experience reinforces what the brand says or quietly undermines it.
That is why I have come to see brand strategy increasingly as an inside-out and outside-in discipline. The strongest brands create alignment between the value they promise, the value their people deliver, and the value customers perceive.
Value Is Ultimately The Test
Brand strategy can be intellectually fascinating, but businesses do not invest in brands to make marketing more interesting. They invest because stronger brands should create an advantage—making a business easier to choose, harder to replace, and more valuable over time.
That belief becomes even more important as BSI enters its third decade.
AI Makes Strategy More Important, Not Less
Artificial intelligence is changing how people search, discover, compare, and evaluate brands. Algorithms increasingly mediate choice. Technology can now produce more content in seconds than a marketing department once produced in months, and the cost of creating communication continues to collapse.
That makes strategy more important.
When everyone can generate content, content itself becomes less differentiating. When machines can produce endless alternatives, clarity becomes more valuable. When technology makes imitation easier, meaningful advantage becomes harder—and more important—to create.
And when AI can competently explain what almost any company does, leaders will have to become much better at answering a more consequential question:
Why should anyone care?
Perhaps that is where the next chapter of branding becomes especially interesting. As technology grows more capable, the distinctly human dimensions of brand—trust, meaning, judgment, culture, empathy, creativity and connection—may become more consequential rather than less.
The challenge will be to understand what is changing without discarding what remains true. And it brings me back to what twenty years of publishing BSI has taught me about authority itself.
No publication becomes an authority because it declares itself one.
Authority is accumulated.
It is earned through useful ideas shared over time. Through thinkers willing to contribute what they know. Through practitioners willing to tell us what actually happened. And through readers willing to challenge those ideas, apply them, and return for the next conversation.
That is why this anniversary belongs as much to the people who have contributed to Branding Strategy Insider and the people who read it as it does to those of us who publish it.
To the strategists, marketers, CEOs, CMOs, researchers, academics, authors, consultants, students, and brand leaders who have made BSI part of how they think, thank you.
To the remarkable contributors who have trusted us with their ideas, thank you.
And to everyone who has challenged an argument, shared an article, brought a BSI idea into a classroom, client meeting, or boardroom, or used something found here to make a better decision, thank you.
Twenty years ago, we set out to create a useful resource for people who build brands.
Today, the ambition is larger.
We want Branding Strategy Insider to continue advancing the thinking that helps leaders build more valuable brands—and helps brand earn its rightful place as a driver of business performance.
There are more voices to hear, more assumptions to challenge, more stories worth preserving and many more ideas still to come.
And there are two decades of thinking already here to explore. These pieces represent only a small part of the BSI archive, but together they reflect the breadth of ideas that has shaped our pages—and the practice of brand strategy itself.
Explore 20 Years Of BSI Thinking
The Bill Bernbach Advertising Philosophy
Creativity grounded in something important, persuasive, and different.
Brand Positioning: Key Questions — Jack Trout
Enduring questions about competition, differentiation, and the position a brand can credibly own.
Winning With New Categories And Subcategories — David Aaker
How brands create growth by changing the competitive frame rather than fighting harder within it.
A Framework For Building Admired Brands — C.W. Park
Connecting brand admiration with loyalty, advocacy, growth, and financial value.
Don’t Let Creative Threaten The Strategy — Derrick Daye
A reminder that great creative is most powerful when it brings strategy to life—not when it substitutes for it.
The Limits Of Textbook Brand Strategy — Mark Di Somma
Why frameworks should sharpen judgment rather than substitute for it.
The Business Model Of Luxury Brands — Jean-Noël Kapferer
Why luxury operates by a different set of economic rules—and how scarcity, control, culture and non-comparability create enduring brand value.
Six Keys To Successful Business Change — Rishad Tobaccowala
A practical framework for creating future competitive advantage when organizations and markets must change.
Why Women Are The Superior Marketing Sex — Mark Ritson
A characteristically provocative Ritson argument about empathy, insight, research and why women may possess distinct advantages as marketers.
Brand Marketing: The Six Principles Of Persuasion — Dr. Robert Cialdini
The science of influence translated into principles marketers can use to understand how people decide and respond.
The Strategic Pricing Power Of Brands — David Stewart
Connecting brand strength to preference, pricing latitude, margin and financial performance.
Your Brand: The Space In-Between — Paul Bailey
A particularly good representation of BSI’s more conceptual thinking about where brands actually exist and how people participate in creating them.
Different eras. Different perspectives. Different answers to some of the most important questions in brand building.
That is precisely the point.
For 20 years, Branding Strategy Insider has been a place where important ideas can meet, compete, evolve, and help practitioners make better decisions.
The conversation is far from finished.
Dr. Derrick Daye
Founder and Publisher, Branding Strategy Insider
Managing Partner, The Blake Project
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
