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Scott Bedbury knows brands. The man who gave the world 'Just Do It' and Frappuccino shares his eight-point program to turn anything - from sneakers to coffee to You - into a great brand.

Whether the product is sneakers, coffee - or a brand called You - building a great brand depends on knowing the right principles. Fast Company asked Bedbury to identify his eight brand-building principles.

1. A great brand is in it for the long haul.

For decades we had great brands based on solid value propositions - they'd established their worth in the consumer's mind. Then in the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of companies sold out their brands. They stopped building them and started harvesting them. They focused on short-term economic returns, dressed up the bottom line, and diminished their investment in longer-term brand-building programs. As a result, there were a lot of products with very little differentiation. All the consumers saw was who had the lowest price - which is not a profitable place for any brand to be.

If you take a long-term approach, a great brand can travel worldwide, transcend cultural barriers, speak to multiple consumer segments simultaneously, create economies of scale, and let you operate at the higher end of the positioning spectrum - where you can earn solid margins over the long term.

2. A great brand can be anything.

Some categories may lend themselves to branding better than others, but anything is brandable. Nike, for example, is leveraging the deep emotional connection that people have with sports and fitness. With Starbucks, we see how coffee has woven itself into the fabric of people's lives, and that's our opportunity for emotional leverage. Almost any product offers an opportunity to create a frame of mind that's unique.

3. A great brand knows itself.

Anyone who wants to build a great brand first has to understand who they are. You don't do this by getting a bunch of executive schmucks in a room so they can reach some consensus on what they think the brand means. Because whatever they come up with is probably going to be inconsistent with the way most consumers perceive the brand. The real starting point is to go out to consumers and find out what they like or dislike about the brand and what they associate as the very core of the brand concept.

4. A great brand invents or reinvents an entire category.

The common ground that you find among brands like Disney, Apple, Nike, and Starbucks is that these companies made it an explicit goal to be the protagonists for each of their entire categories. Disney is the protagonist for fun family entertainment and family values. Not Touchstone Pictures, but Disney. Apple wasn't just a protagonist for the computer revolution. Apple was a protagonist for the individual: anyone could be more productive, informed, and contemporary.

5. A great brand taps into emotions.

It's everyone's goal to have their product be best-in-class. But product innovation has become the ante you put up just to play the game: it's table stakes.

The common ground among companies that have built great brands is not just performance. They recognize that consumers live in an emotional world. Emotions drive most, if not all, of our decisions. A brand reaches out with that kind of powerful connecting experience. It's an emotional connection point that transcends the product. And transcending the product is the brand.

6. A great brand is a story that's never completely told.

A brand is a metaphorical story that's evolving all the time. This connects with something very deep -- a fundamental human appreciation of mythology. People have always needed to make sense of things at a higher level. We all want to think that we're a piece of something bigger than ourselves. Companies that manifest that sensibility in their employees and consumers invoke something very powerful.

Look at Hewlett-Packard and the HP Way. That's a form of company mythology. It gives employees a way to understand that they're part of a larger mission. Every employee who comes to HP feels that he or she is part of something that's alive. It's a company with a rich history, a dynamic present, and a bright future.

7. A great brand has design consistency.

Look at what some of the fashion brands have built -- Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, for example. They have a consistent look and feel and a high level of design integrity. And it's not only what they do in the design arena; it's what they don't do. They refuse to follow any fashion trend that doesn't fit their vision. And they're able to pull it off from one season to the next.

8. A great brand is relevant.

A lot of brands are trying to position themselves as "cool." More often than not, brands that try to be cool fail. They're trying to find a way to throw off the right cues -- they know the current vernacular, they know the current music. But very quickly they find themselves in trouble. It's dangerous if your only goal is to be cool. There's not enough there to sustain a brand.

The larger idea is for a brand to be relevant. It meets what people want, it performs the way people want it to. In the last couple of decades there's been a lot of hype about brands. A lot of propositions and promises were made and broken about how brands were positioned, how they performed, what the company's real values were. Consumers are looking for something that has lasting value. There's a quest for quality, not quantity.

(Internet source: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/10/bedbury.html)