Image: Eleven Madison Park

​Corporate Challenge: Can creating bespoke experiences grow a brand?

Ironbound Strategy:  Every effort to create value for customers, employees, and society gets noticed.  A brand’s loyalty increases when value is constantly being created for their customers, employees, and society.

Ironbound Action: New York based restaurant Eleven Madison Park was already known as one of the best restaurants in the world, but their founders wanted to find new ways of creating even more value for their customers. Soon the team developed a new job called ‘Dreamweavers’, who used available data on guests to create new and bespoke dining experiences for them.*  Designing custom experiences helped elevate the restaurant’s status in the haute cuisine world.  Brands that look for unique ways of creating more value for their stakeholders will always be chosen over their competitors.

Image: Versace Ford Fashion Show

​Corporate Challenge: Empowering your brand while having fun.

Ironbound Strategy: Brands that find fun new ways to create value for their customers and employees have a positive effect on creating value for society.

Ironbound Action: Michigan based Ford Motor Company chose to co-brand with Versace in an unpredictably fun way.  Ford’s normal headlines of higher revenues ($156B to $160B) but lower profits ($16B to $14B) halted to showcase their lineup of Versace apparel including sneakers, jewelry, jackets, a $1,135 hoodie, and even pajama pants. By co-branding the blue oval logo with Versace, Ford shook up the high fashion world, and made people realize that brands need to have more fun with their logos. Brands that make an effort to be fun, are generally the brands that already create a lot of value for their customers, employees, and society.

Image: Jersey Mike’s

Corporate Challenge:  Improving brand awareness and increasing the value of an organization in society. 
 
Ironbound Strategy:  Today more than ever business is about being a responsible member of society.  Powerful brands grow rapidly and attract loyal customers because they focus on holistically creating value across stakeholders: employees, customers, and society.  
 
Ironbound Action:  In 1975 17-year-old high school senior, Peter Cancro Founder and CEO of Jersey Mike’s, borrowed $125,000 and purchased the local neighborhood sandwich shop.  His mission was simple, “Giving … making a difference in someone’s life”.  In 35 years, the single store location on the east coast has expanded to over 1000 locations with rapidly growing presence in southern California. On Wednesday March 27, 2019, Jersey Mike’s will donate 100% of sales to local charities – its 9thconsecutive Annual Day of Giving.  They expect to donate millions to over 200 local charities nationwide.  Creating value in society helps mission driven enterprises scale faster through increased positive brand awareness.

Image: Everclear

Corporate Challenge: Using value creation theory to come back from bad press.

Ironbound Strategy: Brands can always recover from bad press when they share how they create value for customers, employees, and society.

Ironbound Action: Missouri based Luxco produced a high alcohol product called Everclear which gained almost instant negative press for its potency.  The brand suffered as a result.  Luxco waited a few years, and then re-released Everclear with a new bottle designed for mixology enthusiasts. Luxco paid for press promotion sharing that Everclear is the “must have” product for creating new cocktails.  They also re-vamped Everclear’s website to help customers make the most of the product. Bad press brings quick name recognition, and also an opportunity to skyrocket sales when the narrative changes towards creating more value for customers.

* Luxco revenues were estimated at $280M last FY.

Image: DuckDuckGo

​Corporate Challenge: Finding the right partner to co-brand.

Ironbound Strategy: Brands that constantly create value for customers, employees, and society are expected to survive the next industrial revolution, they are the best brands to co-brand with.

Ironbound Action: Pennsylvania based DuckDuckGo recently reached out to Apple for maps integration in their search engine.  DuckDuckGo is popular among millennials as the only search engine that does not track searches.  Recently DuckDuckGo discovered that Google can track what users are searching when they click on a mini Google map during a search.  Apple is known for never selling private information, so DuckDuckGo partnered with Apple Maps to re-code their entire search algorithm to avoid Google Maps.  Brands that share values of privacy generally create immense value for their customers, employees, and society.

Image: University of San Francisco Don's Basketball Game 

​Corporate Challenge: Finding niche customers that need your product.

Ironbound Strategy: Sometimes creating value for one stakeholder, can overlap and create an abundance of value for your customers, employees, and society.

Ironbound Action: California based Lyft has been solving traffic issues around professional sports arenas for years.  Recently Lyft has been reaching out to college’s like the University of San Francisco to manage stadium traffic before and after USF Don’s basketball games. Lyft worked with Don’s Athletics to create an optimal location for Lyft pick-ups and drop-offs to alleviate traffic, and also provided codes for free rides to-and-from the basketball venue for Don’s fans. While creating value for customers, Lyft simultaneously created value for their employees and society.

Image: GoPro at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

​Corporate Challenge: Creating a market space for your product.

Ironbound Strategy: Product Stunts gain a lot of attention. Brands that create value for  customers, employees, and society can successfully convert a stunt into a new loyal customer base.

Ironbound Action: At CES 2019, California based GoPro faced a product stunt by a rival tech company Insta360.  Shenzen based Insta360 offered a deal where they would give you their latest 5.7K Cinematic 360°camera for free, if you threw out your old GoPro on the spot.  GoPro, a company known for filming stunts, saw a decline in their revenue from $1.6B in 2015 to $1.2B last FY.  Meanwhile the 360°camera market is booming, as the Virtual Reality market is expected to reach $117B by 2022.  The Insta360 stunt makes an interesting case study.  GoPro is known as a fun employer that creates value for their employees, but is slow to create value for their customers in a rapidly changing marketspace. When a brand constantly creates value for all of their stakeholders, they can dominate their market spaces, and use product stunts to their advantage.

Image: Santa's Wonderland at Bass Pro Shops

Corporate Challenge: Using value creation to lower customer acquisition costs.

Ironbound Strategy: Customer acquisition costs naturally decline when a brand constantly creates value for their customers, employees, and society.

Ironbound Action: Missouri based Bass Pro Shops have an in-house Santa and Christmas display at all of their stores during the holiday season.  In an effort to create value for their customers, with a free photo with Santa, the retailer attracted a significant number of brand-new customers that did not want to wait in long lines at a mall for a photo with Santa.  Creating value for current customers has the beautiful side effect of attracting new customers, and lowering customer acquisition costs.  Creating value for customers is a surefire way of increasing revenue, and empowering the brand in society.

Image: ABinBev's Miller Lite

Corporate Challenge: Being relevant to the next generation of millennial consumers. 
 
Ironbound Strategy: Powerful Brands are able to become multi-generational by aligning their values with their stakeholders.  Companies are able to seamlessly integrate into our lives because they holistically create positive value for their employees, customers, and society. 
 
Ironbound Action: ABInBev is the leading global brewer and one of the world top 5 consumer product companies. For over 600 years, their brewing heritage has been to help bring people together for a better world.  Water is the number one ingredient (about 90-95%) in beer.  Respecting this valuable natural resource is part of the ABInBev mission, which is why they continue to set corporate social responsibility goals to improve water efficiency as well as ensures quality water access to the communities in which they operate.  At ABInBev, business isn’t just about rewarding investors by making and selling beer, it is also about respecting the resources and communities they operate in. 
 
The US beer market is approximately 111.4 billion.  Craft Brew sales were up 5% in 2017 accounting for about 12.7% of the beer market.  The growing Craft Brew industry employed over 500,000 people and generated $76.2 billion dollars to the US economy in 2017. 

Image: Reusable Disney Cup and Straw

​Corporate Challenge: Capitalizing on millennial preferences and trends.

Ironbound Strategy: Millennials have purchasing trends for brands that are committed to the environment.  Brands that actively create value for customers, employees, and society will thrive among the next largest purchasing demographic.

Ironbound Action: California based Walt Disney Company joined a niche trend to stop using single use plastic straws in the next 12 months across all Disney Parks, around the world.  Last year Disney Parks used 175 million straws, and 13 million stirrers. The trendsetting goal sparked interest by Starbucks, McDonalds, and Royal Caribbean to investigate alternatives to single use plastic straws, and may join the conservation effort over the next few years. Powerful brands set trends. When the trends are favorable to the environment, those powerful brands benefit from millennial attention and purchasing loyalty.
 
* In 2017, Disney Parks also reduced gas emissions by 41%, with a goal to eliminate greenhouse gases altogether.  Disney stock has risen 19.5% in the last 52-weeks.