Know your subject.

Your brain is an idea factory and like any factory it needs a few things to create quality output.

Quality Raw Materials: Ideas, observations, knowledge, art, stories and everything else you’ve ever experienced in your life. Your experiences are just like the materials factories buy – they can be of either low or high quality. The better the quality of your “raw materials” the better the quality of your output.

Energy: Not surprisingly, a well fed and well rested mind is capable of doing more work that one that’s tired and starved of nutrients.

Inventory Management: How your store your experiences and the ability to retrieve them affects your ability to generate new ideas.

A Repeatable Process: Contrary to popular opinion, generating new ideas is not the result of horsing around with Nerf guns and random chance. If you have a structured process for generating ideas, you’ll generate more ideas.

Quality Control: Not all ideas are good ideas, the key is to make sure the bad ones never leave the factory. Before you brainstorm set up the attributes and criteria upon which all your ideas will be judged.

Distribution System: Coming up with ideas is the easy part. Selling them is hard. Understanding and communicating the business objective, strategy, and how your idea fits within the context of the greater environment goes a long way to getting your ideas out into the marketplace.

Work on optimizing all areas of your idea factory and you’ll become a better idea person.

Vision is the most critical element in executive leadership. It’s also the most rare.

The stock market favors this quarter’s performers.

Everybody starts a company with an “exit strategy” in mind.

When the average tenure of a CMO is 18 months, it’s hard to look beyond the next promotion. Because maybe if you throw enough coupons into the market you can get a bump that will stretch that to 24 or god forbid, 36 months. Then you’re a freakin’ genius.

There’s a serious lack of long-term thinking in business today. Investments must made in your product, in your marketing and in your people.

If, however, you don’t have a vision for what things will look like three to five years down the road, you don’t have any business running a business.

There’s nothing unusual about a Harvard graduate. There are tens of thousands of them around the country.

There’s nothing unusual about an American male of Taiwanese descent.

There’s nothing unusual about an undrafted free-agent becoming a successful NBA player.

Put these all together in the center of the media universe, New York City, and you have a sensation. (Sorry, you won’t get any Lin____ puns from me.)

This is as clear a branding lesson as has ever occurred in pro sports. Jeremy Lin is getting so much attention for four reasons.

1. He’s different. See above.
2. He’s relevant. In pro sports that means winning. Believe me, no one would care how many points he’s scored or assists he’s dished out if the Knicks hadn’t gone on a seven-game winning streak.
3. He’s authentic. This is not a manufactured, pre-packaged sports star. This is not “The Decision,” Metta World Peace, or Blake Griffin dunking a basketball after leaping over the hood of his sponsor’s car.
4. He has a platform. With all due respect to Oklahoma City, Cleveland or Detroit, this wouldn’t be as big a story were it happening in any of those cities. It’s not a great story, if nobody hears it.

Here’s a tip: Profiting from someone else’s misfortune or death always reflects badly on your brand.

Sony found out the hard way this weekend after they hiked the wholesale price of Whitney Houston’s “Ultimate Collection” by 60% on iTunes in Great Britain just hours after her death. After much hue and cry from her fans, Sony lowered the price and attributed the mysterious increase to a “error” by an individual employee.

Even if I believed that excuse, then it only demonstrates how weak and ill-defined Sony’s brand is.

A strong brand not only provides a recognizable image and position of your company and products for consumers, it also helps guide decision making for your employees. If your brand values are to treat customers fairly and with respect and they are clearly communicated to your employees, this “error” doesn’t happen.

If, on the other hand, your values are to maximize profits and shareholder return on investment, this is exactly the kind of decision you make. It’s why people are skeptical of the motives of companies like Sony, Bank of America, Walmart, BP and Ticketmaster. And why their brands have taken a beating over the past few years.

While this spot and campaign have been around since last August, I just found out about it through an article in today’s New York Times.

I like it for a few reasons.

First the strategy.

The marketing guy at Chipotle is smart enough to know that even though 75% of their customers said that taste, value and convenience were the most important reasons they came to Chipotle, none of those attributes are either differentiating or meaningful on their own.

Everybody’s food tastes good to someone. Other restaurants are more convenient. And value? Well, we all know how squishy that term is.

So they defined each of those with one message – sustainability.

By saying they work with producers who don’t use antibiotics, aren’t factory-farm suppliers, and only serve produce that fresh and sustainably grown, they’ve made each of those terms meaningful.

The promise of meats from livestock that is raised in a humane manner raises expectations of taste. We all know that if you expect something to taste better, it will in your mind whether it actually does on your tongue.

The promise of supporting family farms and sustainable methods adds value to the experience. You understand that this isn’t the cheapest way to make food, but if it’s something you believe is important, then it’s worth paying a few extra bucks for. Value isn’t always about cutting price.

And this approach changes the parameters for convenience. Sure the McDonald’s and Taco Bell are closer and probably a little faster, but I can’t eat well and do good at either place.

The lesson here? By building your brand around a secondary benefit, you can redefine and add value to the primary benefits in your category, differentiating yourself from the market leaders and transforming customers into advocates for your business.

When you see great marketing like this, it seems simple and obvious. But, as Willie Nelson plaintively sings, nobody said it was easy.