Warren Buffett’s definition of a brand will change yours
By Nick Kendall
A brand isn’t poetry; it’s a powerful tool for business growth, resilience and long‑term profit - Warren Buffett knew it and used this thinking to invest - Nick Kendall explores how to make these ideas central to the next generation of marketers.
Over the last couple of months, two pieces of news caught my eye.
The first was the retirement of Warren Buffett at 94. Known as the Sage of Omaha, he built Berkshire Hathaway into an investment juggernaut worth $1.16tn (£870bn). The world’s most successful investor, he also passes on a legacy of principles and wise words.
The second piece of news was the announcement of the next cohort of The IPA Diploma in January 2026, under the esteemed leadership of Laurence Green and Fern Miller.
The Diploma was part of Stephen Woodford’s vision, as IPA President, to create professional-level qualifications for the industry.
He invited me to design an exam for people at the midpoint of their career. On the cusp of leadership.
My observation at the time (2010) was that there was plenty of training on advertising strategy, and business strategy. But there was little or nothing on brand strategy. What are the principles of what is a brand and how to build it?
Diploma delegates would be led through the ‘shared texts and learnings’ of which the first was Stephen King’s seminal What is a brand? We pursued together the evolution of thinking on brand and what is a 21st Century brand.
The final piece for examination was a 4000-word thesis in the form of ‘I believe … and therefore’, and the best were published. The IPA Diploma became known by the delegates as ‘the MBA of Brands’.
So, between these two announcements, an idea popped into my head.
What if we invited Warren Buffett to give us the inaugural lecture for the 2026 Diploma? How would he answer the question ‘what is a brand?’.
I believe he would answer very differently from our delegates.
Over my ten years as Chief Examiner, most delegates answered with their metaphor of what a brand is. In retrospect this is not surprising, given their exposure to Stephen King who said, for example, “we choose our brands as we choose our friends”.
Diploma delegates followed this trail and showed similar delight in the poetry of what is a brand. A brand is osmosis, a brand is a game, a brand is a community, a brand is a superpower, a brand is a ritual…a tree!
I am not sure the Sage would have been quite so poetic. Buffett loved brands but not for their intangible values. He liked their tangible commercial value.
Buffett’s answer would be: “I believe a brand is the best of investments”. A cursory reading of his investment approach reveals he believed in the long term. He bought stakes in Coca-Cola, Heinz and Apple.
He saw brands as guarantors of future cash flow: surety against the volatilities of the world and of markets.
As a result, he talked of brands as competitive moats long before the tech bros and start-ups made the phrase popular.
In particular, he argued that the defining commercial indicator for a strong brand was its ability to command pricing power:
“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10%, then you've got a terrible business.”
In short, Buffett loved brands: not for what they told us about people and human choices, but because they made money long-term (aka future demand), made more money (aka pricing premium), and made ‘safer’ money (aka better cost of capital and interest rates/better partner terms etc).
What a fantastic inaugural lecture that would be! Brands as tools of wealth creation.
Over a meal at McDonald’s (famously, his daily breakfast) after the lecture I think Buffett would have gently chided me for the bias towards metaphor in the Diploma’s shared texts. He would suggest that we teach the language of investment as well.
Don’t get me wrong. There is a benefit in metaphor. Metaphor helps us understand how brands are created. And that’s our job: to help build them.
But I believe it is also our job to argue for their importance. Only if seen as important by business and the board will we get the investment that Buffett felt they deserved. Only if we do that can we justify our importance in leading their creation – and justify our own price premium.
The January 2026 Diploma, I note, kicks off with a first module on brand as a business tool. Of course it does. As Director of Effectiveness, Laurence Green knows effectiveness in the next ten years is about brand effectiveness, not just comms or IPA Advertising Effectiveness.
May I go further and suggest that the inaugural session should start with our industry's definition of the commercial benefits of brands.
Here is my starter for ten.
What is a brand?
I believe a brand is a business tool for growth … and therefore:
A competitive moat against competitors
A platform for future innovation
An ability to recover sales more quickly when things go wrong
A creator of loyalty over time
A creator of talent attraction and alignment
A guarantor of future cash flow and hedge against volatility
An influencer of stakeholder sentiment for investors, legislators, regulators, government
Our future leaders need to know these off by heart – and the proofs to back them up. Let’s continue to innovate on the principles of how to build brands and continue to create proof to support those principles.
This article was first published in WARC
