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Stronger companies and brands – this is our hope for any marketing-oriented leader and professional who reads our findings on Branding Strategy Insider. Since 2006, we've shared thousands of thoughts focusing on key branding concepts. This year was no exception. From start to finish, we have the defining forces of strategy, markets, culture, consumer behavior, overcommunication, disinformation, category disruption, the speed with which our discipline changes, and perhaps most importantly, how brands react to get a place in one earn, recorded uncertain future.

Thank you to the readers of Branding Strategy Insider for helping us along the way. Offer your ideas, questions, suggestions, opinions and sometimes conflicting views. You have shaped us as authors, educators and brand strategists and contributed to making Branding Strategy Insider the leading resource for marketing-oriented executives and professionals.

Now let's look back at the 35 most-read thoughts of 2020 on Branding Strategy Insider. May they help you develop and unlock the full potential of your brand.

1. Brands thrive as platforms, not products: In this environment, traditional marketing categories such as B2B, B2C, DTC and others (B2C2C) become hazy associations that no longer fit. Forget those halfway descriptors about media bought, shared, and earned. We live in a whirlwind world of messages, bespoke and not. Everything (and everyone) is also something else.

2. Fourteen Considerations For A Successful Branding Strategy: Connecting with consumers is the key skill that is essential to building stronger brand bridges. It takes an end-user focus to evaluate everything you do. This means that the brand planner needs to become the in-house consumer advocate, always considering the consumer perspective in meetings and evaluating how all new products and ideas can be perceived and better used to improve ideal brand perception and performance.

3. Why disruptions favor emerging trends and brands: When market disruptions are far-reaching and radical, traditional business methods are pushed aside to clear the way for emerging trends and small but emerging brands to move into an enduring and sometimes dominant mainstream position. This is the principle of acceleration.

4. Sixty-one Ways To Differentiate Your Brand: To make a meaningful difference for your brand, consult our list of 61 strategies.

5. Brands without meaning are no longer essential: The challenge in creating a successful product is adding meaning to a product that is essentially meaningless – say a t-shirt.

6. Five trends behind growing brand communities: As we move from prioritizing “operational efficiency” through reach and repetition to “adding value” through resonance and relevance, the next decade of #perpetualbeta will reward companies that recognize the strong third line in the brand-consumer relationship: community.

7. Branding 4.0 for the 4th industrial revolution: What is needed is a whole new way of thinking about branding, based on providing value to everyone involved, meaningful to everyone and realizing the importance of human needs: belonging, appreciation and self-actualization.

8th. The formula for business model innovation: The formula for business model innovations immediately gives us important questions about our own business model and how we can improve it:

9. Refreshing brand problems for a bigger future: By creating a Reality Distortion Field, you define a problem in such a way that others are more likely to accept your way of thinking. Steve Jobs was very good at redefining problems, and as such, he was able to encourage people to look at old problems from a new perspective and to come up with new insights and approaches to find a solution.

10. Vision 2020: Leading brands that matter: We are heading in a new direction of personal relevance driven by our increasing focus on the power of identity.

11. Embedding the brand purpose company-wide: A purpose is meaningless unless it is translated into action. With that in mind, let's examine five channels through which purpose can be embedded in an organization – strategy, operating model, culture, internal reporting, and governance.

12. Positioning B2B brands around personal value: Emotions not only play a role in B2B buying, they are even more important than logic and common sense. This insight shows a potentially untapped opportunity for B2B marketers to reposition brands around their personal worth.

13.How Amazon lives from being misunderstood: What are Amazon's greatest innovations? Drones? Cloud computing? Echo and Alexa? These are impressive; Some are even revolutionary. However, I believe that Amazon's greatest innovations are the ones that changed the foundations of competition so much that they now sound mundane.

14. Eight brand storytelling structures: Every brand wants to take their audience on an unforgettable journey. Hence, it is important to take the time to assess what the journey will be like in order to build a brand story. There are many structures that storytellers use to create different types of stories. Here are eight of the most common.

15. Extension of brand relevance and distinctiveness: We know that a successful brand is one that easily springs to mind when you think of this category. Top-of-mind brands are mentally available because of their different but related (consistent across all touchpoints) stocks. One of the keys to brand growth is a deep understanding of what elements make up your brand identity.

16.Companies Survive By Accepting Brutal Facts: Many organizations will not survive the COVID-19 crisis for reasons beyond the control of their leaders. However, if we look back on many business failures and missteps, we will repeatedly see leadership errors related to the Stockdale Paradox.

17. Six rules for a brand revival after the virus: In the short term, there are several ongoing actions necessary for brands.

18.Identification of business winners and losers: Innovative ideas can fail in two ways. The most visible flaws are those that have been brought to market without success. More insidious are errors associated with good ideas that never hit the market because they lack the resources and management support to implement them.

19. E-Commerce Strategy: From Transaction to Experience: Online shopping is usually a single activity – more about the outcome than the experience. But will that change?

20. The 50 Most Common Branding Problems: Awareness of the problems and challenges brands can face is an important step in maintaining a strong, healthy brand. That's why we've set ourselves the goal of identifying, analyzing, and resolving the 50 most common branding problems that marketers are facing today. Which ones threaten your brand?

21st Three principles for change and disruption: In the past, three principles have been recommended for assessing whether or not the so-called normality that follows a disorder is new. These principles lie on a continuum from nothing new to something new for anything new. They have a granular relevance for brands, no less than a macroeconomic relevance for categories and markets. And they define a sequence of gates through which every change must go in order to be permanent and far-reaching.

22. Ten prerequisites for brand growth: Most marketers are still battling for market share and to do so successfully these ten measures should be considered.

23. The strongest brands have always been agile: Marketing and communication can be reinvented again and again, with each new and non-apologetic rendering being billed as a break with a seemingly blind and rigid tradition. Except that they are nothing like that. Although things feel fresh, most of the reinvention is historical repetition.

24. Ten brand strategies for success in 2021: When it comes to coronavirus, there are ten ways companies and brands can adapt to tell the difference between success and failure in 2021.

25. Building leading brands with trust and purpose: “Brand I can trust” is an attribute that brands have long measured. In retrospect, it was hardly a differentiator a decade ago. However, this attribute has taken on new meaning in this day and age, especially with Gen Z's entry into the workforce.

26. Brands need to adapt to smaller consumer worlds: Today's market is defined by fragmentation. This variety of tastes, values, ideologies and lifestyles creates a complex operating environment for brands. The universal mass market America, defined by a common aspiration narrative, has given way to a nation of smaller worlds.

27. Three factors influencing new consumer behavior: We can look at some basic human motivations that are likely to determine preferences and behaviors in The New Normal.

28.How brands live from being the opposite: Realizing what you are not creates new markets, new behaviors, new thinking.

29. Seven Ways Brands Can Create Social Movement: The strongest brands represent something bigger than the products they sell, as we have seen in various examples of social movements. Here are seven things brands can do to create a social movement.

30. Definition and structure of intangible assets: First, it is important to understand that most intangible assets do not appear on company balance sheets. This means that for most companies, much of their value is not reported. Current accounting practices simply fail to capture the value of most intangible assets.

31. Ten ways to redefine your brand: We discovered ten things that can help you redefine offerings and relationships for lasting value.

32. The turnaround strategy starts at the core: When a brand is in trouble, focus on its core customer base first. Love the customer you have before you focus on the customer you don't have. When a brand is in trouble, activate, protect, and empower the core customer. It is the core customer who finances a turnaround profitably and provides the platform for the future.

33.Six Keys to Activating The To Do Theory: Nine of America's top ten most valuable companies can trace their size back to realizing the boundaries of a market. From ExxonMobil to Apple to Wal-Mart, these companies expanded markets that others viewed as static. How can companies break new ground in today's economy, which are seemingly constrained by highly competitive markets on all sides?

34. The brand management of dead celebrities: Dead celebrities and icons inspire us, occupy a place of influence, and deserve a place of love and respect in our hearts and minds. With various forms of intellectual property and subject to its protection, management and creative redesign, deceased celebrities and icons have great potential for earnings even after they have left the physical world.

35.Building the customer's first mindset: Agility is often seen as a process when it is really a mindset (supported by processes, of course). Yes, it's about testing and learning and new ways of working, but at the heart of agility is the determination to give the customer something he or she wants or needs.

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