Seven Steps to Building a Best-Selling Brand


Building a brand is about more than spending money on marketing. It’s about how you think about your brand conceptually, and the strategies you employ at every level of your business. That was the message from brand architect and strategist Larry Gulko when he spoke at the Rady School of Business at UC San Diego recently.

Gulko laid out his recipe for success in seven simple steps. His first piece of advice: specialists win, generalist lose. He points to several examples of companies that lost sight of their core business and ended up failing. Gulko told the crowd, “be the Q-tip.” He says it’s a brand unmatched in specialization and name recognition. His next six steps touched on everything from connecting with your customer, to inspiring your employees to be brand ambassadors.

After his talk, Gulko sat down with two UC San Diego alumni-turned-entrepreneurs to learn their brand secrets. Pierre Sleiman is the CEO of Go Green Agriculture, and Suman Kanuganti co-founded Aira, a high-tech company improving the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired. Gulko, Sleiman, and Kanuganti have a lot of expertise to share about branding, including why you don’t remember your second kiss, and what that has to do with being a best-selling brand.

Watch Building and Growing Brands with Larry Gulko: Global Business Leadership Forum