Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, has parlayed
a lifelong disdain for conventional business wisdom into a $3.5 billion
international conglomerate and one of the world’s most powerful and
recognizable brands. Under the ubiquitous Virgin banner, Mr. Branson has
ventured into a panoply of businesses — from condoms to wedding gowns, from
airlines to financial services — and in the process has taken on entrenched giants and wrested market share from them.
All the while,
the flamboyant and irreverent Mr. Branson has tweaked the business establishment, particularly in Britain, and
displayed a good command of publicity and showmanship to gain priceless cachet
for the Virgin brand. He has been, for much of the past 30 years, one of the
most admired Britons, and his fame has spread in recent years around the globe
as Virgin has expanded its reach and its luster.
Mr. Branson
loves nothing more than a daunting challenge; he views the impossible as just
another business opportunity.
His trademark
is outlandish publicity stunts. He will do almost anything to promote the
Virgin brand: driving a tank down Fifth Avenue in New York to introduce Virgin
Cola to the United States, risking his life in high-profile hot-air balloon
adventures or portraying a drowning victim on television’s “Baywatch.”
But Mr. Branson
stands for more than balloon trips and powerboat races across the Atlantic.
Behind the brash and insouciant huckster,
there lies a sharp business visionary who has created a formula for success
that is rife with lessons for chief executives in any country and any business.
Mr. Branson’s success reflects an uncanny ability to take the consumer’s point
of view as his own and find ways to embrace that view for profit.
Despite his personal riches, Mr. Branson has retained an “everyman” persona marked by his casual dress, affable and modest manner, and devilish disrespect for convention. He understands viscerally the concerns and needs of his customers and his employees and acts as a conduit for fulfilling those needs. He has built the Virgin brand in his own image, and the result is an extremely positive emotional bond between consumers and companies that bear the Virgin label. It is brand-builder’s nirvana, made all the more impressive because the brand is all that ties together more than a hundred disparate Virgin businesses. There is little synergy or shared resources among the Virgin companies; Virgin, in fact, resembles the classic Japanese keiretsu such as a Yamaha or Mitsubishi.