“Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it.” - Peter Drucker

Knowing who you are as a company is such a critical component of sustained growth.  What often happens is that as companies grow, the most exciting question for people to ask is, “What else can we do?” And the path of least resistance is to start your new ventures under the same brand.  But what happens next is the inevitable brand confusion and lack of focus of a staff.  I have personally seen this happen more than I would wish, even though the problem is what keeps us in business.

In Peter Drucker‘s book Management, he says,

It's not easy for the management of a successful company to ask, “What is our business?” Everybody in the company thinks that the answer is so obvious as not to deserve discussion.  It is never popular to argue with success, never popular to rock the boat.  But the management that does not ask "What is our business?" when the company is successful is, in effect, smug, lazy, and arrogant. It will not be long before success will turn into failure.

The first core branding question to be answered is that of “Who are we?” Perhaps it's more important for a growing, successful company to answer this question than a struggling company, as the struggling company is forced to answer it in order to survive.

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