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CEO must be constantly looking for a way to increase brand reach and should be "obsessed" with the brand.
That's according to former Vodafone and Coca-Cola marketer David Wheldon, who spoke to an audience at the "Festival of Media" event in Switzerland. He suggests that chief executives should be understanding and pushing brand values in the same way that Starbucks' Howard Schultz continues to do and the late Steve Jobs did with Apple.
Cited by
Marketing Week, he said: "The real truth of great brands is that the CEO must be the brand director, be obsessed with it and how it is perceived."
Weldon stated that CEOs should not be taken in by new marketing concepts nor should they discard old techniques. A mix of the two remains crucial to strengthened brands.
"If marketing people think that old [ideas] are good or that new ones are better - both are fools," he exclaimed. "The biggest truth is that marketing has not changed. Three things have, however - the channel, the feedback loop and the boundaries for ideas."
According to
exchange4media.com, Wheldon managed to quote Amazon chief executive Jeffery Bezos when trying to sum up how important a brand is about a company, stating that a brand is "what people say about you when you are not in the room".