• by Micheal P. Gumbert , June 3, 2025

Medtronic’s Senior Paid Media Specialist writes "Building a brand is hard work. We should also not pretend that the payoff for that hard work will come immediately, rather the payoff will often come years later."

What is a brand worth? Are brands even worth anything at all? How long are we willing to work on making our brands worth something? Back in April I was watching the Masters and while I am, relatively, new to golf, I too had a question. The question. Would this be the year that Rory completed his career Grand Slam? When that last putt fell into the cup on Augusta’s famed 18th green the world watched as Rory released a decade’s worth of emotion. How many times had he wanted to quit? According to Rory he never considered quitting and if true, Rory can then teach a lot about building brands.

During his week in Georgia Rory was, famously, told by his daughter, Poppy, that he already knew how to play golf after coming back from a lesson. Poppy would tell us the same thing we already know how to build brands. But this is the first lesson Rory can teach us, namely that building a brand takes work. It means going back to first principles and remembering the basics. Here it bears reminding that our brands are more than logos or sayings, rather our brand is every interaction we have with our customers and even our employees. Marketing may be the voice of a brand, but it is not the builder of a brand.

For eleven years Rory went to Georgia knowing the story line …is this THE year? But for years Rory kept coming back to face that very question, and the heartbreak of failure, in order to chase history. The lesson here is that building a brand IS hard work. We should not pretend it is easy. We should also not pretend that the payoff for that hard work will come immediately, rather the payoff will often come years (hopefully not a decade) later. By putting in that hard work we will see that work rewarded in a thousand little ways along the path to our larger business goals. In some ways the work on our brands might become a reward unto itself.

Our successes will probably never be shown to millions of people on live television. People might never recognize us, or even the work we do for our brands. But they might know the brand we build. Growing a business and helping our customers achieve their dreams is no less dramatic or impactful in their own ways. It becomes a great story and who doesn’t love a great story?

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