Blackstone Hires Droga5 Chief Strategy Officer Jonny Bauer To Lead A New Brand Initiative

With nearly $650B assets under management, Blackstone sits atop the rapidly growing alternative investment industry. So what interest does the alternative investment mogul have in AdAge’s 2020 Creativity Awards Chief Strategy Officer of the Year, Jonny Bauer? According to an article from Forbes, Blackstone’s hiring of the former Droga5 Chief Strategy Officer is a commitment […]

The Role of Marketing in Customer Success

Branding and marketing professionals are tasked with communicating a brand’s value and point of differentiation, in turn creating a compelling story for consumers. These stories are a critical part of driving brand growth and increasing revenue. And while most marketing professionals got into the business because they believe in the before mentioned power of storytelling, […]

How Data Protection Affects Brand Reputations

Brands are a public statement of an organization’s commitment to consumers. And while we often speak to things that are inherently brand-centric — value proposition, brand consistency, naming — it is important to remember that a brand is a reflection of an organization in its entirety. In an increasingly interconnected world, brands must be cognizant […]

What Brand Marketing and Anchovies Have in Common

Anchovies and B2B brand building? What could possibly be the connection between the salty canned forage fish and B2B companies? David Dodd marries these seemingly disparate items with great tact in his article, “What Brand Marketing and Anchovies Have in Common”. Dodd analogizes a common amateur chef mistake, foregoing anchovies while following a recipe – […]

The Rise of the B2B Tech Brand

In the world of technology, an industry focused on continuous change and improvement, the biggest challenge for B2B tech brands is consistency. While this may seem paradoxical, Aanandita Bhatnagar highlights this need for consistency in her article “The Rise of the B2B Tech Brand”. As B2B consumers are becoming increasingly autonomous, B2B tech brands must […]

Build a Culture to Match Your Brand

Building a succinct brand/culture connection for your organization can be difficult, but the most successful brands match their internal organizational goals with their external brand identities. What this means in the context of brand building is that you first must clearly define your brand identity in order to match your cultural core values to that […]

Understanding the “Non-Rational” Dimensions of B2B Buying

While brand development is not necessarily formulaic (branding sits somewhere between art and science) the majority of what we discuss here at Sustena can be categorized as “rational”. However, David Dodd’s article “Understanding the ‘Non-Rational’ Dimensions of B2B Buying” reinforces the antithesis which we know to be true – not all business decisions are linear […]

The Brand Driven CEO

For most companies, its single most valuable asset is its brand. So why is it that companies often overlook the power of branding and the brand development process? In a Forbes interview with David Kincaid, author of ‘The Brand-Driven CEO: Embedding Brand into Business Strategy’, Kincaid details the negative cascade of misalignment and mismanagement that […]

Why Human Psychology Still Matters in B2B Marketing

There is a common misconception that B2B branding and marketing are completely rational, and while B2B organizations are often more rational than B2C consumers, there is a human element to all B2B decisions. The effect of this humanness (which we see in ourselves every day) is that human psychology and behavioral economics have an immense […]