Richard Branson: Like a Virgin

Contrary to appearances, Virgin is highly focused: our customers and investors relate to us more as an idea or philosophy than as a company. It’s all about the Virgin experience and the ongoing challenge is to make sure that this experience is consistent with its expectation levels across all sectors. It’s all about the brand.

If you are embarking on a new venture, how should you envisage and develop your brand? Let’s start with a quick sketch of what a brand does.

Brands exist as a means of communicating what to expect from a product or service. Subscribers to a magazine or newspaper expect a certain perspective and subject matter; families look forward to taking their kids to see the new Pixar movie, regardless of whether it’s about animals, toys or cars.

The Virgin brand tells you that using this credit card is rather like using this airline, which, in turn, is rather like using this health club, staying in our hotels and paying into this pension fund. It is a guarantee that you’ll be treated well, that you’ll get a high-quality product that won’t put any surprise dents in your bank balance, and you’ll probably get more fun out of your purchase than you expected.

Should you follow the Virgin formula and focus your new company on providing a certain customer experience? It really depends on the type of business you are in. We are in consumer-facing sectors where service is key. You need to assess what is core to yours.

When you are creating your first ads, designing a logo and reaching out to potential customers for the first time, you may be tempted to create a brand that’s very corporate and remote. Too many companies want their brands to reflect some idealised, perfected image of themselves. As a consequence, their brands acquire no texture, no real personality and no public trust.

In contrast, Virgin wears its often self-deprecating sense of humour on its sleeve. It has to do with our wanting to be honest about the ups and downs of our business and to share what we think with the people who matter most to us – our customers. The people who see our ads are the same people who read about our tussles, our setbacks and our mistakes. So why would we want to pretend the real world doesn’t affect us?

Whatever you and your team decide that your new brand will stand for, you will have to deliver on that promise. So when you’re having these discussions, be honest about what it is you’re offering.

It is far better to underpromise and overdeliver than vice versa. Superlatives-laden ads for mediocre services and products are the norm with way too many operations. Promise only what you can deliver, and then deliver everything you promise plus some. That’s the only way you’ll ever control your brand.

And beware: brands always mean something. If you don’t define what the brand means, your competitors will. Apple’s ads contrasting a fit, happy, creative Mac with a fat, glum, nerdy PC tell you all you need to know about how that works.

So, what’s next? For any business building a consumer brand, speaking to journalists is part of the deal. Be prepared! Know what you stand for and be certain that you’re delivering it. Then you’ll be able to answer every question openly and frankly, building your relationships with your customers and the media.

When Steve Jobs died in October 2011, many commentators wondered whether Apple, the company he co-founded and led through many exciting years of profit and innovation, could continue to thrive without him.

After struggling with cancer, Jobs stepped down from his post as Apple’s CEO, yet his impact on the company remained profound. After all, Apple’s innovations – from the personal computer to the iPod, iPhone and iPad – radically changed the way the world communicates and plays. Following Jobs’ sad death at just fifty-six, many argued that Apple’s future might now be in doubt.

This debate got me thinking about leadership and whether there is one right way to build a great company. Comparing my own experiences at Virgin and Jobs’ at Apple was illuminating, since we both built our companies over the past five decades, but we did so in very different ways.

Jobs’ ideas about how people should interact with technology and his single-minded pursuit of that vision led him to create a company with a culture that combined obsessive attention to design with highly inventive technology. Computer use was limited to industry and business until he and his team introduced the Apple II in 1977, which transformed computing and our daily lives.

Apple also led a revolution in the music industry when the company introduced the iPod and iTunes in 2001; while the later release of the iPhone and iPad fuelled the creation of a whole industry of application developers. Jobs’ passion for great design was the foundation of what is now one of the world’s most respected brands.

When my friends and I were building Virgin, we had to approach things very differently, because our vision was founded not so much on a product, but on service. Our culture arose from our constant engagement with our customers and each other. This led us to build a company devoted to customer service and staff engagement; to providing great value and maintaining a sense of fun in everything we do – and our company has gone on to open hundreds of businesses in many different industries.

Steve Jobs tended to be autocratic, taking a top-down approach, while I have always believed in the art of delegation – one of my primary roles is finding the best possible people for Virgin and giving them the freedom and encouragement to flourish. When I set up Virgin Records, I even moved out of the office and set up my desk in a houseboat. My thinking was, and still is, that if you are not always available it forces other people to call the shots, which in turn improves their own leadership skills, builds their confidence and strengthens your business and leaves you with more time to innovate.

So how is it that our very different paths have both resulted in the creation of successful companies? I believe it comes down to pursuing our passions – we both truly enjoyed and believed in what we were doing. Because you are far more likely to be persistent, inspired and dedicated if you love what you do, and if you eventually make something you are truly proud of that filters down to your staff and your customers. This was true of Steve Jobs, and for this reason, despite our vastly different styles, he was always the entrepreneur whom I most admired.

Looking back over Steve Jobs’ life, he never lost sight of his love for the company he founded, despite being ousted from Apple in 1985. Once outside Apple he transferred that energy, investing in and leading a small company called Pixar, which achieved stunning artistic and technological feats and transformed the field of computer animation. When he was asked to return to Apple in 1997, he led the then flagging company to new heights, and continued working throughout his illness. For me, leading Virgin has been my great adventure: challenging, exciting and creative, this is something I would do if there were no money in it at all.

Sometimes pursuing your vision means that you will have to ignore others’ warnings and even jeers. I have written about my decision to start Virgin Atlantic and then Virgin Australia: so many of my decisions have gone against the advice of industry analysts, management gurus and sometimes my closest advisers.

In Jobs’ case, the products he and his team envisioned were so different that the stock price usually dropped after one of Apple’s products was first introduced to the public, because shareholders and ‘experts’ were so certain that the company was headed in the wrong direction. This happened most recently with the release of the iPhone 4S, and again it was an aberration – sales of the device have since broken all previous records at Apple.