The Importance of Brand Pillars
Always be supporting the vision, mission and values of your brand
If you think about some of the most successful brands in America, they are well-defined in attributes that support the vision, mission and values of the brand. These attributes are often referred to as their brand pillars. Brand pillars serve as a foundation for how the brand behaves, communicates and connects with its target customers.
When I was the President of Jimmy John’s, we went through a branding exercise to identify the brand pillars that helped crystalize what the brand is today. Through a series of exercises, we helped determine the following:
- What the product does for me
- How I would describe the product
- How the brand makes me feel
- How the brand makes me look
We looked at both the rationale (brand facts and symbols) as well as the emotional (brand personality) to determine three core brand pillars to use as a vetting measurement for all go-forward branding and product decisions. At the end of the exercise, we identified three core branding attributes:
- Lightning — everything we did had to have a sense of urgency to it
- Vibrancy — our stores, people and culture needed to embody a vibrancy
- Thoroughbred — our brand had to be pure and powerful to stick to its core
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