Chief Executive Magazine Article: Top 25 Brand Leaders

Chief Executive Magazine – November 2004 cover story, Top 25 Brand Leaders – How The Smartest CEOs Build Their Brand. Hint: It Takes More Than Just Marketing. was recently made available online via BNET for free.
The nine page PDF is available for download here: Top 25 Brand Leaders: How The Smartest CEOs Build Their Brands. It does require a registration to the site but that is also free.
Here’s the overview:
“Many CEOs today are finding they must oversee brand management. Emerging from a period of scandal and recession, CEOs want to rev up top-line growth, and therefore getting the branding message right is critically important. They are determined to make sure their marketing departments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars with a hard eye on results. Other factors are that media choices have become ever more diverse with the arrival of the Internet and other digital media. Increasingly, good brand management is seen as an integral part of overall management.”
One of the more interesting key learnings appears on Page 27. In their “The Making Of A Brand Leader – How CEOs and CMOs define a CEO brand leader” graph on a scale of 0% – 80% “customer experience” ranks as the highest importance just ahead of “foresight and innovation” while at the bottom, “organizational structure” and “design” round out the least important factors.
Here is just one of many telling quotes from Top 25 Brand Leaders – How The Smartest CEOs Build Their Brand:
“Increasingly, good brand management is seen as an integral part of overall management.”
Now go grab your own copy and learn how companies like Dell, FedEx and JetBlue made the cut.