Level 5 Blog

Profit magazine, the business publication dedicated to the promotion of this country’s entrepreneurial spirit, recently released its Top 200 list celebrating the fastest-growing companies in Canada. For the second year in a row, LEVEL5 was included in this esteemed inventory, and we couldn’t be more pleased. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Not only does this honour recognize the success we’ve had as an organization, but it’s also a de facto validation of our core belief that your brand is your business system^TM. If this approach wasn’t proving its worth with our clients, surely, our business wouldn’t be growing as it is.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Ironically, however, the notion of treating your brand as your business system remains an alternative and out-there perspective for many, especially those who insist that their brand should be the domain of the marketing department alone. It’s really just a marcom effort, they argue. We couldn’t disagree more.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Instead, we remain fiercely committed to teaching C-suite dwellers of branded businesses to consider all of the elements of their business system—from HR to Operations to Sales and Marketing—when thinking about their brand. And, so far, they seem to be coming around. Inside of our passionate tutelage, they’re demonstrating a comprehensive appreciation for the value of developing their brand, and their business system, into a sustainable competitive advantage.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Indeed, perhaps by this time next year we will be celebrating the inclusion of more of our clients (some are already there) on Profit magazine’s ranking of Canada’s fastest-growing firms.

Later this month, Playboy will open a new club in London, and, with it, usher in abrand new era of old-fashioned sexuality.

That a powder puff of incredulous disapproval has ignited in response mightsuggest the time is right for a review of just how well the Playboy brand is aligning with the social environment into which it’s hopping.

The club, returning to London’s posh Mayfair district after a 30-year absence, purports to service “men with money and taste.” Just as it did in its heyday, backwhen guys were peg-legged hipsters with dangling cigarettes, and gals were pencil-skirted accessories. With this occasion, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner returns us to the days of such corset-cinched attitudes about the sexes, and underscores his 1967-expressed conviction that “a girl resembles a bunny… First it smells you, then it escapes, then it comes back and you feel like caressing it, playing with it.”

But the pastures upon which these nose-twitching mammals play are radicallydifferent now than they when Playboy opened its first club, in Chicago, in 1960. And a brand that resonated with its penmates a generation ago may well inspire the opposite effect today.

Could it be that Playboy’s enthusiastic re-entry into this rabbit warren lays bare a vision disconnected from the market it seeks to serve?

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