Nicholas Ind

Equilibrium Consulting / Oslo / N
nind@equilibriumconsulting.com

Oslo-based, Dr Ind is a widely published author, brand expert and respected public speaker. Nicholas Ind is a partner of the consulting firm, Equilibrium Consulting. Previously, he ran Icon MediaLab’s brand consultancy arm in Sweden.

Nicholas is the author of a number of articles, academic papers and nine books including The Corporate Image, selected as a business book of the year; the best selling, Terence Conran—the Authorised Biography; The Corporate Brand and Living the Brand. He was also the editor of the Medinge-authored, Beyond Branding.

Nicholas is a former Director of the Design Business Association, a member of the advisory board of Corporate Reputation Review, the editorial board of the Journal of Brand Management and an Industrial Fellow at Kingston University. He is an Associate Professor at Oslo School of Management and a Visiting Professor at ESADE, Barcelona and Napier University, Edinburgh.

Nicholas has an undergraduate degree in English Literature and History, an MBA and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

Speaking

Living the Brand
Successful brands are about imagination. These are the brands that inspire us. These are the organisations we feel emotional about; the brands that we trust. Yet stimulating imagination among employees and customers is hard. In this presentation, Nicholas uses examples such as Nordstrom, UNICEF and Patagonia to demonstrate how memorable and powerful ideas can build employee involvement and commitment. The companies that succeed at this, benefit in terms of higher productivity, enhanced financial performance and greater intellectual capital.

Branding and Sustainability
This presentation argues that branding is important because it creates value. This is about having a clear and authentic ideology, which should incorporate principles of sustainability The challenge for most organisations is to build sustainability into the culture and everyday actions of the organisation. That requires commitment and participation. The presentation shows how organisations can build responsible and sustainable brands that also build long term brand value.

Inspiration: Creativity and Innovation
This presentation shares the results of research from a new book, called ‘Inspiration’ that investigates organisations where creativity is an inherent part of the culture and where continuous creativity is maintained as part of the process of building competitive advantage. Using such examples as IDEO, Volvo, Quiksilver and Tate Modern the presentation explores with the audience the barriers to and key success factors of creativity.

Writing

Nicholas is the author of eight books including The Corporate Image (1990/1992) – selected as a business book of the year; Terence Conran – The Authorised Biography (1995); The Corporate Brand (1997); Inspiration (2004) and Living the Brand (2001/2004/2007). His latest book is Branding Governance (2007) which is about an organisation wide approach to brand building. He is also the editor of Beyond Branding (2003).

Against Leviathan: building rhizomatic brands
The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 3, no. 1, 2009

A Participative Approach to Brand-Building
The argument of this paper is a simple one: creating value for customers is an organization-wide responsibility. The author reconsiders the market orientation papers of Narver and Slater and Kohli and Jaworski and introduces the concept of Participatory Market Orientation.
The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008

Beyond Branding: from Abstraction to Cubism
This paper argues that rather than relying on the abstraction of research to get close to the customer, brand managers should work at building genuine relationships with customers by opening up the boundaries of the organization.
The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007