Cahier II · The brand, a strategic asset

From brand to reputation — The virtuous circle GTM → Brand → Reputation

What remains is to understand how this asset is built — for that is where traditional approaches fail, treating the brand as an isolated object, a matter of logo and messaging.

Field observation and the data of the major institutes alike converge towards a circular mechanism, which the GTM NEXUS 360® methodology formalises in three stages.

Go-to-market builds the brand

A brand is not born in a style guide: it is deposited, layer upon layer, in commercial execution. Every sales cycle run with method, every value proposition upheld, every client delivered in line with the promise constitutes an act of brand — the only one that truly counts, because it is lived and not declared.

The brand feeds reputation

Reputation is the socialised form of the brand: what third parties — clients, prescribers, candidates, financiers, and now AI models — say and believe about the company when it is not in the room. RepTrak's "Think-Feel-Do" model illuminates the transmission: what stakeholders think about a company (products, performance, conduct, leadership) shapes what they feel, and that feeling governs what they are prepared to do — buy, recommend, trust, invest, apply, extend the benefit of the doubt. Reputation is not an image rent; it is a stock of supportive behaviours awaiting activation.

Reputation loops back onto go-to-market

This stock produces its effects exactly where the executive already measures them without knowing it: shortened decision cycles, lowered cost of acquisition, increased recommendation rate, accepted price premium, unsolicited applications. Gartner's multipliers and BCG's margin gaps move with this loop — without any data isolating its causal share — and its circular nature explains both the power of the mechanism when it is engaged, and its cruelty when it turns the other way: failing commercial execution erodes the brand, which degrades reputation, which makes every subsequent sale more expensive.

A virtuous circle cannot be decreed: it must be steered. And to steer it, you have to know where you stand on each of the three arcs.

A virtuous circle cannot be decreed: it must be steered.

Sidebar

Opinel, or the virtuous circle in its purest form

If a single French SME had to embody the thesis of this cahier, it would be Opinel. Its product is, by nature, about as commoditisable as they come: a pocketknife, exposed for decades to global low-cost competition and to counterfeiting. Everything in this case condemned the company to a price war. Everything — except the decision, taken from the outset and never disavowed, to treat the brand as a strategic asset.

The asset is constituted, then protected. The brand and its emblem, the Crowned Hand, are registered as early as 1909. More than a century later, the company claims industrial protection as one of the pillars of its success: over 900 protections — trademarks, designs, patents, domain names — in nearly 100 countries, backed by legal battles it willingly wages against counterfeiters. An SME of fewer than 200 employees thus devotes continuous investment, on a global scale, to defending an asset that does not appear on its balance sheet.

Execution feeds the brand, the brand feeds reputation. Manufacturing remains entirely anchored in Chambéry — blades, handles and forging — and each generation of the family defines itself as a "custodian" of a company to be passed on in better shape than it was received. This consistency of execution has produced reputation signals that no advertising budget can buy: the entry of the name into the Larousse dictionary as early as 1989, an exhibition at New York's MoMA, a selection by the Victoria and Albert Museum among the finest objects in the world, and a company museum that has become the most visited in Savoie. So many third-party validations — institutional, cultural, touristic — which constitute the very definition of reputational capital.

Reputation loops back onto growth. The public figures translate the mechanism: a turnover that rose from around 8 million euros in the mid-2000s to nearly 35 million in 2024 — quadrupled in fifteen years — with 6.5 million knives sold per year, 45% of business from exports, a subsidiary in the United States, its own retail stores, and a self-financed industrial investment of 10 million euros, all while preserving complete family independence. On a century-old, imitable product, the brand is the residual explanation for this trajectory: it is the brand that permits the price, opens up exports and makes growth financeable without dilution.

The lesson for any SME executive is direct: Opinel does not have a great brand because the company grew; it grew because it managed its brand as an asset — registered, defended, embodied in execution and passed on as such.

Sources: data published by the company and the business press — Le Journal des Entreprises, 2023-2025.

Sources : données publiées par l'entreprise et la presse économique — Le Journal des Entreprises, 2023-2025.

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Go-to-market builds the brand

The brand feeds reputation

Reputation loops back onto go-to-market

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