Compound interest has been called the eighth wonder of the world.
Einstein is often credited with the idea, but it is Warren Buffett who lived it. The concept is deceptively simple. Small, consistent investments accumulate. At first, nothing seems to happen. Then, if you stay the course, the curve shifts. It bends.
Buffett once said the biggest mistake people make is interrupting compounding too soon. I see the same mistake happen in brand. We expect brand to respond instantly, as if it were a switch.
But brand does not work that way. It grows the same way wealth does. Not in neat quarterly jumps, but in long arcs of trust, meaning, and memory. For a while, it looks flat. Then, given enough clarity and consistency, it compounds. So, how do great brands actually grow.
Slowly. Then suddenly.
This is the patience premium. And it may be the most underestimated force in modern business.
The slow then sudden curve
When I think about long-term brand building, Toyota remains one of the clearest examples. Its growth was anchored in Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. Not a campaign, not a tactic, but a discipline. A commitment to getting a little better every day. Over decades, this approach created something stronger than headlines. It created belief. Quietly. Steadily. Year after year.
The first visible bend in Toyota’s curve came in the late 1990s when it introduced the Prius. The world was not ready for hybrid technology, and the early impact seemed modest. But Toyota stayed the course. It refined the product, sharpened the narrative, and kept investing in a future most competitors considered too far away to matter.
Then the curve turned.
By the mid-2000s, the Prius had become a global phenomenon and a cultural symbol of innovation and environmental leadership. Toyota’s momentum, which had been building quietly for years, finally became visible. Its market valuation crossed the $100bn mark for the first time, overtaking both Ford and General Motors. Interbrand placed Toyota among the most valuable brands in the world during this period, consistently ranking it the number-one automotive brand for more than a decade. What looked sudden was simply compounding becoming visible.
And Toyota is far from an exception.
Apple’s turnaround, L’Oréal’s quiet rise to global leadership, Patagonia’s values-led surge, and Dyson’s design-driven ascent all followed the same pattern. Years of consistency, discipline, and coherence. Years of seeming flatness. And then a moment when the world suddenly noticed what had been building all along.
From Silicon Valley to Saudi Arabia
The slow and sudden pattern is not a Silicon Valley phenomenon.
I have seen it emerge wherever a brand commits to clarity and stays with it long enough. It shows up in our region too, often just as powerfully.
STC is one of the greatest examples. Its rise did not come from a single campaign or announcement. It came from years of steady alignment through a clearer ambition, a sharper identity system, a more coherent portfolio, and a narrative consistently pointing toward Saudi Arabia’s digital future.
The work was incremental. The impact was not.
For years, STC strengthened quietly. Small shifts in experience. Small improvements in design. Small signals of a larger ambition. None of them looked transformative on their own. Together, they built momentum.
Then the curve turned.
Brand Finance valued STC at $16.1 bn in 2025, up 16 per cent year on year. It became the most valuable telecom brand in the Middle East, one of the fastest growing globally, and earned an AAA brand rating. What appeared to be sudden acceleration was simply compounding becoming visible.
The tension every leader faces
Brand does not grow at the speed of a dashboard. It does not move in weekly reports or quarterly increments. It moves in human time. In memory. In trust. In the slow accumulation of meaning.
Most leaders arguably understand this. They know brand shapes demand, resilience, and pricing power. But they also operate inside systems built for immediacy. Lower a price, see a spike. Increase media spend, see a bump. Launch a promotion and watch the numbers twitch. These signals feel real because they move fast.
In my experience, brand works differently. It strengthens quietly beneath the surface, long before it shows up in the metrics organisations obsess over. And when it finally becomes visible, it can look like a sudden surge even though it was years in the making.
This is the tension leaders face. Belief in the long-term power of brand on one side.
The short-term machinery of the organisation on the other.
So what do you choose? The long game or the short one?
You play both.
Performance keeps the business running. Brand keeps the business rising.
Extensive research from Les Binet and Peter Field reinforces this dual-tempo reality. Their work shows that the companies that win are the ones that balance short-term actions with long-term brand building, giving brand the consistency required for the curve to bend while still delivering the quarter. It is not a trade-off. It is a balance.
What this means for you
If you lead a business, the patience premium reframes brand as a compounding asset. Not a cost to defend each quarter, but a source of accelerating long-term value.
If you build brands from within, it reinforces the power of staying on strategy even when results feel distant. Every decision, every brief, every improvement is a deposit that will reward you later.
If you advise leaders, it gives you a language the C-suite understands. Not awareness and storytelling, but compounding, resilience, and enterprise value.
The patience premium
If Toyota and STC teach us anything, it is this.
Brand does not reward impatience. It rewards conviction. It rewards the leaders who keep showing up with the same clarity, the same belief, and the same coherence long after the world has stopped paying attention.
Compounding needs time on its side. So does brand.
The strongest brands are not built by spectacle. They are built by hundreds of small decisions made in the same direction. A better brief. A clearer message. A more coherent experience. A team aligned around what it stands for.
Each decision is a deposit.
Each deposit compounds.
And one day, almost quietly, the curve bends.
Reputation becomes preference.
Preference becomes pricing power.
Pricing power becomes resilience.
The bend never looks extraordinary while you are inside it.
Only in hindsight does it look inevitable.
This is the patience premium.
The reward for building the kind of brand that grows not by chance, but by compounding.
By Rohit Banka, Brand & Communication Strategy Director, Accenture Song
