Brand thinking, rigorously and practically applied.
An Overview
For nearly four decades, brand strategy was my business — and my passion. Through Brand Tool Box, the firm I founded in 1984, I had the privilege of working with an extraordinarily diverse range of organizations: global corporations and small businesses, manufacturers and retailers, for-profit and nonprofit, private companies and governments.
That diversity was never accidental. It was the crucible in which my thinking about brand management was tested, refined, and ultimately proven. Every client brought a different culture, a different business model, and a different set of challenges. Meeting those challenges with a consistent set of principles — and adapting them thoughtfully to each context — is what I believe separates enduring brand thinking from passing trends.
The case studies below represent a cross-section of that work. Each one tells a different story, but all of them share a common thread: the power of brand thinking, rigorously and practically applied.
3M Building a Global Corporate Brand Strategy Across an Innovation Empire
The Challenge
By the mid-1980s, 3M had built one of the most admired innovation engines in the world. Its corporate strategy demanded that 25% of annual revenue come from products developed within the previous five years — a relentless focus on new product development that had produced an extraordinary portfolio of technologies and brands.
But that same innovation-driven culture had created a significant brand management challenge. Decades of new product launches had resulted in a sprawling portfolio of product names — some overextended, some underleveraged, and many carrying little meaningful brand equity. Established brands had become diffused through overuse, while the corporate brand itself had been largely neglected in favor of product-level activity. The result was an organization with enormous brand potential and no coherent strategy to manage it.
The Approach
In 1986, 3M retained Brand Tool Box to lead the development of a corporate brand strategy that would bring coherence and discipline to brand management across its global business divisions — one of the most complex and ambitious brand assignments of its kind at that time.
Our team worked directly with the leadership team of each operating division, providing hands-on brand management training and developing a tailored brand strategy that addressed the specific needs and opportunities of each business. This division-by-division approach ensured that the strategy was grounded in the realities of each unit rather than imposed from the top down.
Once the individual divisional strategies were complete, we synthesized them into a unified corporate brand strategy — a governing framework for all future brand identity decisions across 3M’s global operations.
The Results
The new corporate brand strategy gave 3M a disciplined, enterprise-wide approach to brand management that reinforced its reputation as one of the world’s most innovative companies. The engagement deepened into a long-term relationship — following the corporate brand strategy work, Brand Tool Box was retained to develop brand strategies for 3M’s most important consumer product brands, including Scotch, Post-it, Scotchgard, and Thinsulate, among others.
Cargill Crop Nutrition Transforming a Commodity Business Through Internal Brand Building (Cargill Crop Nutrition is now Mosaic)
The Challenge
The fertilizer division of Cargill — the world’s largest private company — faced a fundamental strategic shift. Long operating with a traditional commodity mindset, the division wanted to reorient its entire business around building and growing value-added customer relationships. That kind of cultural transformation requires more than a new strategy. It requires changing the way every employee thinks, communicates, and behaves.
The Approach
Brand Tool Box implemented its Internal Brand-Building program across the entire organization — from the global senior management team to all employees at manufacturing locations, headquarters, and sales offices, including a full rollout in Brazil.
Working closely with the executive team, we developed a brand strategy that became the operating discipline for the division’s transformation. As part of that work, we recommended renaming the division Cargill Crop Nutrition to signal its new market position, and established a unified global branding identity — covering nomenclature, visual elements, and key messages — all anchored in the value-added customer relationship strategy.
The Results
Cargill Crop Nutrition measured a substantial bottom-line impact within the first 12 months. More importantly, the organization gained immediate traction on its long-term customer-focused strategy — with every employee aligned around building the brand through their individual interactions and behaviors, around the world, every day.
The Toro Company Building a Multi-Tier Brand Strategy to Win Across All Channels
The Challenge
Maintaining power brand status in a rapidly shifting retail landscape requires a more sophisticated brand management approach than most companies are prepared for. The Toro Company faced two interconnected challenges: meeting the demands of competing big box retailers — Home Depot and Lowe’s — who each wanted a unique product assortment, and managing the channel conflict that inevitably arose as consumers shifted their purchasing behavior across channels.
Senior management recognized that the answer lay in developing a multi-tier brand strategy that could leverage the distinct equities of both their Toro and Lawn-Boy brands.
The Approach
Brand Tool Box was engaged to lead the development of that strategy. We began with a comprehensive consumer research study to assess current perceptions of both the Toro and Lawn-Boy brands and identify the key decision-making criteria consumers use when purchasing lawn care power equipment.
Based on those findings, we developed a multi-tier channel strategy that included a brand repositioning strategy for the Lawn-Boy brand and specific recommendations for how The Toro Company could most effectively deploy Lawn-Boy to expand market share with big box retailers while protecting the integrity of the Toro brand across all channels.
The Results
The Toro Company implemented the multi-tier brand strategy recommendations, redesigning the Lawn-Boy product offering and developing new merchandising programs that enabled the company to compete effectively across all sales channels — giving each retailer a differentiated assortment while eliminating damaging channel conflict.
Patterson Dental Building a Stronger Brand to Drive Deeper Customer Relationships
The Challenge
Patterson Dental, an industry-leading distributor of dental products, equipment, and services with $1.6 billion in annual revenue, had built its success on a strong sales culture. But senior leadership recognized that to create a stronger market position, the company needed to move beyond transactional selling and build deeper, more loyal relationships with dentists.
Adding complexity to the challenge, Patterson operated four distinct but related business units, each with its own identity. Any brand strategy would need to support cross-selling across those units while navigating the identity concerns of individual business unit leaders — a delicate internal balancing act.
The Approach
Brand Tool Box conducted one of the largest research studies ever undertaken in the dental distribution industry, assessing the Patterson Dental brand’s key strengths and differentiators and uncovering what customers truly wanted from a relationship with their dental dealer.
Those findings, combined with an intensive internal brand audit, informed the development of a differentiated brand strategy and a unified brand identity system that fully leveraged Patterson Dental’s existing brand equity. We then translated the brand strategy into practical tools for the sales organization — enabling representatives to quickly and consistently build stronger, more loyal customer relationships. The engagement concluded with the implementation of Brand Tool Box’s Living the Brand training program for sales representatives and all employees.
The Results
The brand strategy gave Patterson Dental the organizational focus needed to make a larger impact in the marketplace. Three of the four business units consolidated under a single corporate identity — resulting in internal alignment, more efficient cross-selling, and an external perception of Patterson as a comprehensive, integrated solutions provider. The broader result was an organization that genuinely understands, lives, and breathes the importance of customer relationships.
Skandia Building a Consistent Global Brand Across 23 Countries
The Challenge
Skandia, a global leader in financial services, had built a strong brand through decades of growth. But with businesses operating around the world, maintaining brand consistency across vastly different markets, cultures, and organizational units had become increasingly difficult. Senior leadership wanted to strengthen the global brand by creating greater alignment in communications and activities across all of their businesses worldwide.
The Approach
Brand Tool Box began by meeting with Skandia’s Global Brand Council to establish a common language around brand and brand management — a critical first step in any global brand initiative. That conversation surfaced both the opportunities and the challenges of defining the Skandia brand consistently at a global level, and laid the groundwork for developing a robust global brand strategy.
With the strategy in place, Brand Tool Box facilitated an executive-level meeting in Madrid, Spain, bringing together Skandia’s top 100 executives to build consensus and create genuine enthusiasm for the new direction. The Madrid sessions used a series of workshops and exercises grounded in personal brand principles — helping executives not just understand the brand strategy intellectually, but connect with it personally and commit to it authentically.
Brand Tool Box then customized its Living the Brand internal brand building training program for global deployment, rolling it out to Skandia employees across 23 countries.
The Results
The new brand strategy energized the Global Brand Council and gave the organization clear direction and renewed passion for its future. The global training rollout created strong internal brand alignment — ensuring that Skandia’s brand was experienced consistently and authentically by customers around the world, regardless of market or geography.
Target Stores Pioneering the Owned Brand Strategy That Transformed American Retail
The Challenge
Target was already known as an innovative retailer when it recognized an emerging opportunity: building and growing its own proprietary brands. Given the extraordinary strength of the Target store brand with consumers, the potential for owned brands to deliver superior profit margins — compared to national brands — was significant.
But the reality on the ground told a different story. Target was carrying more than 50 private label products with inconsistent quality, limited brand coherence, and very little commercial success. The opportunity was real; the execution wasn’t there yet.
The challenge was equally acute in apparel — historically a drag on revenue and profits for mass merchandise retailers. Without access to popular, trendy national apparel brands, growing Target’s apparel business seemed like a non-starter. Something had to change.
The Approach
Brand Tool Box was retained to develop a comprehensive owned brand strategy for Target. Working across the organization’s buying groups, we created a structured framework: two distinct owned brands for each buying category. That discipline alone reduced Target’s owned brand count from more than 50 labels to fewer than 20 — bringing coherence, quality consistency, and strategic focus to what had been a fragmented collection of labels.
Brand Tool Box then coached each buying group through the process of launching their owned brands successfully. The results spoke for themselves: Cherokee became a recognized apparel brand, Archer Farms established Target as a credible grocery destination, and owned brands took root across hard lines categories as well.
Over nearly eight years of engagement, Target’s merchandising activities were completely reoriented around building and growing owned brands — a strategic shift that fundamentally changed how the company went to market.
The Results
The owned brand strategy became a cornerstone of Target’s growth — and remains so today. The mix of higher-margin owned brands grew to represent a significantly more important share of Target’s sales and bottom-line results, giving the company a sustainable competitive advantage that national brand-dependent retailers simply could not match.
More broadly, Target’s success with owned brands helped pioneer a strategy that changed the retail industry. What Target demonstrated — that a mass retailer could build genuine brand equity in its own proprietary products — reset expectations and practices across the industry.
The Scotts Company Resolving a Post-Merger Corporate Identity Challenge
The Challenge
The Scotts Company was the undisputed leader in the North American lawn and garden category, going to market through a powerful portfolio of product brands — Scotts, Miracle-Gro, Ortho, and Roundup. But like many consumer packaged goods companies, Scotts had historically focused on its product brands at the expense of its corporate identity — to the point where multiple different corporate identities were in use simultaneously in the marketplace.
The recent merger of The Scotts Company and The Miracle-Gro Company added significant complexity to the situation. Although Scotts was the larger organization, it was the Miracle-Gro management team that assumed leadership of the combined company. Both corporate identities carried genuine brand equity and distinct marketplace associations — making the corporate identity decision not just a branding question, but a sensitive internal and political one.
The Approach
Brand Tool Box led a rigorous evaluation of three corporate identity alternatives, conducting four separate research studies to assess the brand equity of each existing identity, the extendibility of each name, and the potential risks of deploying each in a broader corporate brand context.
The research findings were analyzed and synthesized into a clear, well-supported recommendation for senior management. But as is often the case in post-merger situations, arriving at the right answer was only part of the challenge. Gaining genuine commitment from a leadership team with divided loyalties required as much skill in facilitation and executive alignment as it did in brand strategy.
The Results
Senior management accepted the recommendation to adopt The Scotts Company as the unified corporate identity for the combined organization — and committed to giving that corporate identity a new, more prominent role in the company’s market presence. Perhaps most importantly, consensus was achieved across a leadership team that had come to the table with competing loyalties and perspectives.