Branding 123: Build a Breakthrough Brand in 3 Proven Steps (123 eGuides)

Branding 123: Build a Breakthrough Brand in 3 Proven Steps (123 eGuides) Review

This new eGuide offers small businesses with fledgling brands the opportunity to apply proven strategies and techniques used by the big guys. Branding expert Barry Silverstein, co-author of The Breakaway Brand (McGraw-Hill), provides readers with a comprehensive yet simple plan to follow so they can (1) build a brand positioning statement, (2) build a brand identity, and (3) build a brand marketing plan. Specific examples and a wealth of additional resources are included. Written clearly and concisely, Branding 123 has everything you need to build a breakthrough brand.


123 eGuides is a new series of authoritative guides published exclusively in electronic format to provide maximum value at minimum cost. 123 eGuides employ the magic of three, based on the simple principle that virtually anything can be accomplished in three proven steps.

123 eGuides are designed for today’s reader who wants information in a quick, convenient, easily readable format. Each 123 eGuide is intended to provide a functional overview rather than a detailed roadmap. Every 123 eGuide always includes additional resources if the reader wants to learn more.

Brand Atlas: Branding Intelligence Made Visible

Brand Atlas: Branding Intelligence Made Visible Review

A company’s brand is its most valuable asset.  Wheeler takes the most seminal tools used by a wide variety of thought leaders and practitioners and makes the information understandable, visible, relevant, exportable and applicable. With her best-selling debut book, Designing Brand Identity (Wall Street Journal, Best-Seller, Spotlight 1/23/2011), now in its third edition, Alina Wheeler reinvented the marketing textbook using a straightforward style to help demystify the branding process. This new offering from Wheeler, Brand Atlas, builds on this user-friendly approach to aggregate and simplify the science behind branding with a unique visual teaching method suited for time-crunched professionals.

Brand Atlas follows the recent YouTube-iPhone-Pecha Kucha era trend toward fast-paced visual instruction by neglecting needless jargon and combining vivid, full-color images and easy-to-follow diagrams to break down branding principles into basic step-by-step concepts that can be immediately applied. This handy reference:
•    Speaks to a broad range of stakeholders in the branding process—from CEOs to designers to brand managers
•    Provides tools to integrate brand throughout the entire customer experience, build relationships based on brand, measure a brand’s value, and define a brand strategy
•    Contains essential information illustrated through the use of diagrams

With diagrams designed by Joel Katz, an internationally known information designer and a global authority on the visualization of complex information, Brand Atlas is a compact, no-nonsense guide that shows how tactical innovation in the design process is crucial to building brand assets.

More to Explore from the Book: Ten Imperatives for Branding Success

Branding is big business. For most businesses, brands represent their most valuable asset, influencing customers, prospects, investors, and employees. Companies often go through a complex internal process to identify the best branding firms to partner with -choosing from an array of global brand consultancies, design offices, or specialists in areas such as packaging, user experience, and social media.

Why do some brand initiatives just fizzle after an initial investment of capital and resources? Whether you are a consumer brand, a nonprofit, or a mid-size service business, the following imperatives ensure positive outcomes for your brand.

1. Ensure that the leadership team endorses the brand initiative and understands the process. There must be a strong mandate from the top. If the commitment to revitalize the brand is tepid, the initiative will expire, and the investment will have no return.

2. Establish clear goals and an endpoint. Why are we doing this? What are the deliverables? How will things be different at the end of the process? For example: we will have new branding guidelines to make it easier to communicate clearly and consistently about our brand to our customers and to our employees.

3. Establish clear responsibilities. Acknowledge that your investment will require company time, not just writing checks to the consultants. It's a collaborative process, and will require leadership's focus. Identify an internal person whose job it is to be the direct contact for the branding firm. They have to be a "make it happen" person with superior organizational skills, and access to the key decision makers.

4. Use a disciplined process with clear decision points and benchmarks. Agree on what the brand stands for before any creative work is done. Use a tool like the brand brief to ensure that key decision makers agree on your brand's essence, its competitive advantage, your target market, and your value proposition.

5. Stay customer centric. The best brand decisions can only be made with the customer's needs and experiences in mind. See the world through the eyes of your customers.

6. Commit to a small decision group that has the power to make the pivotal decisions that impact the brand. Do not bring in new decision-makers in the middle of the process. All decision makers must be involved and be present at all key decision points.

7. Determine if your company is truly ready to make a commitment to revitalizing your brand and implementing new brand standards. Is your company ready to invest the time, the capital and brainpower to revitalize your brand?

8. Determine how you will measure the success of this initiative. Consider benefits like employee engagement and a more effective and efficient marketing toolbox. Communicate that the brand is the most valuable resource and it's everyone's job to protect and grow that asset.

9. Use the process to build brand champions throughout your company. Launch internally first, then externally to customers. Make sure that all of your vendors have access to the new standards. Be diligent about communicating why you made these changes and what they mean. Smart organizations use the branding process to refocus stakeholders on their vision, values and mission.

10. Demonstrate—don't declare—why customers should choose you over others. Seize every opportunity to communicate your value and to differentiate your brand from others. Use the process to identify the places where your can build trust, attract new customers, and inspire customer loyalty.

The process demands a combination of investigation, strategic thinking, creativity, design excellence, and project management skills. When done right, the process can achieve remarkable results for your brand.

Brand Aid: An Easy Reference Guide to Solving Your Toughest Branding Problems and Strengthening Your Market Position

Brand Aid: An Easy Reference Guide to Solving Your Toughest Branding Problems and Strengthening Your Market Position Review

This is a ready reference that leads the way for anyone setting out to build a winning brand! Written by an acknowledged expert with 20 years of experience building world-class brands, "Brand Aid" is a day-to-day quick-reference guide that provides solutions for the 22 most pressing problems faced by brand managers. This comprehensive, practical how-to guide also gives readers 17 invaluable end-of-chapter checklists to help them assess and advance their own brand management efforts. Succinct and easy-to-read, it features exercises, formulas, case studies, proprietary research findings, and other useful tools including a template to help them do a complete brand audit. "Brand Aid" covers topics ranging from research, positioning, and advertising to brand equity management, legal issues in brand management, and creating a brand-building organization. It includes an overview of the entire brand management and marketing process, as well as in-depth discussions of brand building on the Internet and internal brand building. A treasure trove of techniques, templates, and rules of thumb, "Brand Aid!" is an indispensable roadmap for anyone responsible for building their organization's brand.

Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People (Updated and Revised Edition)

Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People (Updated and Revised Edition) Review

Emotional Branding is the best selling revolutionary business book that has created a movement in branding circles by shifting the focus from products to people. The “10 Commandments of Emotional Branding” have become a new benchmark for marketing and creative professionals, emotional branding has become a coined term by many top industry experts to express the new dynamic that exists now between brands and people.
The emergence of social media, consumer empowerment and interaction were all clearly predicted in this book 10 years ago around the new concept of a consumer democracy. In this updated edition, Marc Gobé covers how social media helped elect Barack Obama to the White House, how the idea behind Twitter is transforming our civilization, and why new generations are re-inventing business, commerce, and management as we know it by leveraging the power of the web.
In studying the role of women as "shoppers in chief, "and defining the need to look at the marketplace by recognizing differences in origins, cultures, and choices, Emotional Branding foresaw the break up of mass media to more targeted and culturally sensitive modes of communications. As the first marketing book ever to study the role of the LGBTQ community as powerful influencers for many brands, Emotional Branding opened the door to a renewed sensitivity toward traditional research that privilege individuality and the power of the margins to be at the center of any marketing strategy.
A whole segment in the book looks at the role of the senses in branding and design. The opportunity that exists in understanding how we feel about a brand determines how much we want to buy. By exploring the 5 senses, Emotional Branding shows how some brands have built up their businesses by engaging in a sensory interaction with their consumers.
Emotional Branding explores how effective consumer interaction needs to be about senses and feelings, emotions and sentiments. Not unlike the Greek culture that used philosophy, poetry, music, and the art of discussion and debate to stimulate the imagination, the concept of emotional branding establishes the forum in which people can convene and push the limits of their creativity. Through poetry the Greeks invented mathematics, the basis of science, sculpture, and drama. Unless we focus on humanizing the branding process we will lose the powerful emotional connection people have with brands.
Critics hailed Emotional Branding as a breakthrough and a fresh approach to building brands. Design in this book is considered a new media, the web a place where people will share information and communicate, architecture a part of the brand building process, and people as the most powerful element of any branding strategy. Most importantly, it emphasizes the need to transcend the traditional language of marketing--from one based on statistics and data to a visually compelling new form of communication that fosters creativity and innovation.

Branding By Blogging: Build Your Brand Identity And Online Presence To The Maximum Using This Ultimate Business Branding Strategy And The Power Of Blogs!

Branding By Blogging: Build Your Brand Identity And Online Presence To The Maximum Using This Ultimate Business Branding Strategy And The Power Of Blogs! Review

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Blogging is one part of an advertising campaign. It is a powerful marketing tool that can give you free exposure --- publicity that your business needs to develop a strong web presence and establish your brand identity. A blog is easy to maintain and flexible. Unlike a website, which is stagnant and fixed, a blog can be anything you want it to be. Depending on your creativity and mood, you can fix your blog up to target your needs. A blog is very friendly, too. It has the ability to reach out, connect, and link up to other active blogs far and wide into the blogosphere. Combined with other advertising efforts, a blog has the capability to broadcast your product and business and be a powerful money-making tool. This book will disclose full information about blogging and its significance to your business as an advertising tool. It contains detailed guidelines on setting up a blog, the benefits you can expect to derive from it, planning for relevant content, maintaining a blog, and promoting a blog through tried and tested marketing techniques. Create your blog now with the help of this blogging manual and see it build your brand identity and online presence to the maximum!

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• Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

Customer Review

Oct 27, 2011 09:30:05

How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding

How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding Review

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Coca-Cola. Harley-Davidson. Nike. Budweiser. Valued by customers more for what they symbolize than for what they do, products like these are more than brands--they are cultural icons. How do managers create brands that resonate so powerfully with consumers? Based on extensive historical analyses of some of America's most successful iconic brands, including ESPN, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Harley-Davidson, this book presents the first systematic model to explain how brands become icons. Douglas B. Holt shows how iconic brands create "identity myths" that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change. Holt warns that icons can't be built through conventional branding strategies, which focus on benefits, brand personalities, and emotional relationships. Instead, he calls for a deeper cultural perspective on traditional marketing themes like targeting, positioning, brand equity, and brand loyalty--and outlines a distinctive set of "cultural branding" principles that will radically alter how companies approach everything from marketing strategy to market research to hiring and training managers. Until now, Holt shows, even the most successful iconic brands have emerged more by intuition and serendipity than by design. With How Brands Become Icons, managers can leverage the principles behind some of the most successful brands of the last half-century to build their own iconic brands. Douglas B. Holt is associate professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School.

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• Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands
• Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation
• Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People, Updated and Revised Edition
• The Origin of Brands: How Product Evolution Creates Endless Possibilities for New Brands
• Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

Customer Review

Sep 11, 2011 06:15:07

Competitive Branding: Winning in the Market Place with Value-Added Brands

Competitive Branding: Winning in the Market Place with Value-Added Brands Review

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"Torsten H. Nilson's new book Competitive Branding contains useful information on two of the hottest words in marketing, "competitive" and "branding". It's a must read." Jack Trout, President of Trout & Partners Ltd USA, and global marketing strategist. "With the increasing recognition that brands are assets that have to be actively managed, we all need keys to unlock the processes for managing brands in a disciplined way. This book opens the doors!" Raoul Pinnell, Global Head of Brands and Communications, Shell International Petroleum Company Ltd. "Branding is increasingly recognized as the essence of marketing. This book will give you plenty of ideas on how to build, grow, and perpetuate your brands." Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, USA. In his new book Torsten H. Nilson provides solid, practical and well-founded good advice and methods for building brands cost-effectively - brands that will succeed in the increasingly competitive market place. This book will help the reader to:
* create and implement a programme to build a competitive brand
* understand how brands are created, building the value of the brands
* use all the different parts of the marketing mix to build the power of the brand
The focus of Competitive Branding is not so much "how to do the above" but more "what to do" to achieve success. Torsten H. Nilson has developed a conceptual framework based on his vast experience - not only does this aspect set the book apart from others on this subject but it gives the reader the opportunity to consider all the strategic aspects of branding in the context of their organization. The busy professional will find this enlightening book, which is illustrated with truly inspirational examples and cases, one of the most useful in developing a successful competitive brand.

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Customer Review

Sep 10, 2011 05:18:35

Effective Branding Begins with a Name. . .And Other Keys to Creating Brands People Love

Effective Branding Begins with a Name. . .And Other Keys to Creating Brands People Love Review

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This Element is an excerpt from The Truth About Creating Brands People Love (ISBN: 9780137128167) by Brian D. Till and Donna Heckler. Available in print and digital formats.

 

Get branding right from the start, with great product names, powerful differentiators, and meaningful, motivating, memorable taglines.

 

“Close-Up,” “Jiffy Lube,” “Rain Dance,” “The Medicine Shoppe,” “Irish Spring,” and “Puppy Chow”: all are great names that reflect the essence of the product or service. Good branding starts with the name--the representation of the brand, conjuring images, concepts, and experiences. The name is the foundation for these perceptions....

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• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
• Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management
• Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever
• Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bands
• Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Customer Review

Aug 28, 2011 06:59:04