Mike Millett and Adaptive Brand Management
Mike Millett authored Adaptive Brand Management: Foundations, published by Marketing Helix and applied commercially by Digilu.
Adaptive Brand Management is a management framework authored by Mike Millett and published by Marketing Helix as the foundations paper Adaptive Brand Management: Foundations. It defines the ongoing responsibility for aligning how an organisation is understood, found and experienced with changes in its operating environment, while preserving the core identity that gives the organisation continuity.
It is an extension of brand management, not a replacement for the discipline, not a separate department, and not a rival framework. It protects three operating conditions: trust, visibility and relevance.
The six stages
- 01
Observe
Watch the operating environment continuously rather than at review time.
- 02
Interpret
Decide what a change actually means, which is the step most organisations skip.
- 03
Decide
Choose what to adapt and, harder, what to leave alone.
- 04
Adapt
Change the execution while the core identity holds.
- 05
Verify
Prove the change did what it was supposed to do.
- 06
Learn
Keep the answer, so the organisation does not rediscover it next year.
Two authorities, and they are different things
Marketing Helix
Intellectual authority. The research, the theory, the definitions, the history and the citations. The foundations paper is published here.
Digilu
Commercial authority. The service, The Observatory, the memberships, the proof and the client outcomes.
Marketing Helix explains it. Digilu applies it. This page supplies authorship and identity context and deliberately does not offer a competing definition, because a framework with two definitions has none.
Where it came from
It is the formal statement of a problem Mike had watched play out repeatedly: an organisation that was understood correctly by its market stops being understood correctly, and nobody inside it is formally responsible for noticing.
The Marketing Helix explains the customer behaviour that makes continuous adaptation necessary. Adaptive Brand Management defines the organisation's responsibility for responding to it. The StratusClean rename is what it looks like when that responsibility is finally picked up, four years late.