10 THINGS TO LEARN FROM THE 10 BEST BRANDING BOOKS

The field of branding is constantly evolving, so it’s essential to keep up with the latest thinking and pair that with the tried and proven. One quick way to level up is to learn from books.

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1 IDEA – 1 CHALLENGE – 1 QUOTE

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IDEA FROM ME

From ”Find Your Why” to ”Strategic Brand Management”, there will never be one best book, but these are the essential books on branding; an essential guide, short of a definitive guide if you will. I own a hard copy of each of these books, so the books were picked from my personal library. Here are 10 things you can learn from the 10 best branding books.

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Start With Why?by Simon Sinek

and?Find Your Why?by Simon Sinek, David Mead and Peter Docker

Start with why is not technically a branding book, but I will argue that once you have found your why – the reason why you are in business – that provides clarity and a hook to hang your branding on.?Patagonia, the outdoor clothing brand’s Why is to “limit ecological impacts” and to “save our home planet”. You are aligned with this Why the owner recently basically?gave away the company?to fight climate change?

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Start with why makes the case, with case studies, that organisations, people and causes with a strong why are more successful. Knowing your why and making your why known is what rallies people behind your cause. The author’s?TEDx Talk?is one of THE most popular talks ever and worth listening to.

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As you saw from the heading of this section, I included Find Your Why with Start With Why. I group the two books together because Start With Why makes a strong case for Why but I found the companion Find Your Why a very handy workbook to find your why so that you can start with your why. The workbook even provides agendas for your discovery meetings, with expected duration and facilitator tips.

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Set aside a few weeks to work through the two books and to clarify your why.

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My head is spinning from all the why’s…

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The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding?by Al Ries and Laura Ries

If you are into branding, then The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding will be one of those books on branding that you won’t be able to put down once you start reading it and you can finish it over a weekend or absorb one law per day, with only about eight pages per law. The laws include The law of Marketing, The law of quality, The law of the name, The law of extensions, The law of the company, The law of colour, and so on. One of the laws I strongly believe in is that it is category first and then brands in consumers’ minds.

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Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind?by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Sadly, both of the pioneers of brand positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout, have departed, but they left us Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

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The book makes a case for positioning (no surprise there) and explains what it is. We are all aware of how crowded and competitive the marketplace is, but the same is true of the consumers’ mind space. The easiest way to get into the consumers’ minds is to be first with a new offering or sub-category, and if you can’t be first, then you have to position your brand relative to your competitors. You will learn about the ladder in consumers’ minds and how to position your brand as a leader. Concepts such as name and extensions from the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding appear again.

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What I find especially helpful are the six extensive case studies that show positioning in action. You will find the chapter about how to position yourself interesting and who won’t like to know the 6 steps to success?

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Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind is a must-have and a keeper to refer back to again and again.

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Building a StoryBrand?by Donald Miller

and?Marketing Made Simple?by Donald Miller and J.J. Peterson

Again, I bundle two books. Building a StoryBrnd is one of the books that I thought, “what is the hype about”? I wondered about the genius of the book for months because the concept presented is not new. The concepts have been used and are still used for scripting movies, but the genius is the application of these known principles to branding. The idea and the elements that make up the concept are so easy that it took me a while to appreciate the application value. Okay, the book is all about clarity achieved through the StoryBrand framework, which goes something like this; a character has a problem and meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action, which helps them avoid failure and end in success.

The framework only works if you realise that your brand is not the hero (similar to The Hero Trap by Thomas Kolster), rather, the consumer is the hero and your brand is the guide. So, once more, your customer is the character who meets your brand (the guide) and your brand gives your consumer a plan to solve their problem. Your brand calls the customer to take specific action to avoid failure and to solve their problem.

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As with the companion book Start With Why and Finding Your Why, Building a StoryBrand makes a case for the topic, in this case, the StoryBrand framework, but Marketing Made Simple is the workbook to take you through the process as you apply the framework to your brand.

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Zag?by Marty Neumeier

Marty Neumeier has an exceptional talent for design and distilling important branding concepts. In Zag, the author highlights how cluttered consumers’ minds are, as in Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout, and proposes radical differentiation as the solution to get noticed – when they zig, you zag!

A 17-step process is offered to help think through the process systematically. As a bonus, a brand glossary is included – similar to mine that you receive when you subscribe to the Brand for Success Newsletter.

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PS: I keep ZAG, The Brand Flip and The Brand Gap, all by Marty Neumeier, on my desk for their brilliant cover designs. I have seen few cover designs like these – simple black and white with few words, but wow… you will have to see the two not shown for yourself.

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Steal like an artist?by Austin Kleon

Can I, as with Marty Neumeier’s books, get a moment to get over how beautiful this book and the other two from the same author are… When I became aware of this book, I looked it up on Amazon and ordered three of the author’s books in part to make the delivery costs worth it and when it arrived, I was so glad that I ordered the physical books. I wasn’t expecting square books. I guess the books measure about half a ruler by half a ruler (you see, I do not have to worry about cm and inches). Books that are dimensionally different and beautifully designed with clever titles are hard to find. I guess this is the advantage Neumeier and Kleon have being designers first and then authors.

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Oh yes, Steal Like an Artist… as brand strategists, designers, developers, copywriters, etc., it is acceptable and necessary to “steal” ideas from others. It is best to get inspiration from multiple sources and then make it your own. As I told my wife, who enjoys painting, about the book… if you copy Picasso, you are a copycat, but if you copy elements from various artists and make it your own style, then you are unique. This is the premise of Steal Like an Artist.

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The book includes other valuable tips like “do good work and share it” (social media), “creativity is subtraction”, and others.

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Another trilogy worth keeping, if only for its beauty.

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Strategic brand management?by Kevin Lane Keller and Vanitha Swaminathan

I started using this book from the second edition and think Professor Keller brought out the first 3 or 4 versions under his name only, and the book is co-authored from the 4th?edition. As Al Ries and Jack Trout are the pioneers of positioning, Prof Keller and David Aaker are the godfathers of brand management. This book is the bible of brand management and is based on extensive academic research. This is not a book that can be read over a long weekend while watching the game. It needs to be studied and is often prescribed at master’s level at universities.

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I studied and taught this book cover to cover multiple times over many years and continue to do so at different universities. This is my brand management foundation for very serious brand management students and brand strategists. This book covers it all to develop a strong brand, no a world-class brand from basic components like new product development, visual branding, digital marketing examples and will help businesses attract customers. It is definitely worth reading, in relatively plain English – the complete guide with expert insights.

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Design and Identity by Alina Wheeler

It started as a visual identity guidebook but includes many important brand management topics. Appreciating comprehensive books like these, I can’t but spare a thought as to the effort and time that must go into developing and keeping up to date a book like this.

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As with the book Zag, Design and Identity, include a glossary of terms – maybe my brand glossary isn’t such a bad idea after all. You will go far to find a more comprehensive book on all things design – logos, packaging – with examples by the 100’s, processes and much more.

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Design and Identity always leave me with the realisation of how many areas of specialisation there are in the field of brand. As a brand strategist, this book reminds me to leave design to designers but to know more than a surface level what good visual identity design entails.

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Conclusion

You would have noticed that I did not include books by Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell and the like because I wanted to stay close to brand management. Similarly personal branding was’nt the aim but you could develop your brand strategy with these books. This list and the key takeaways may be useful for business owners for business strategy, graphic designers for visual branding/ designing brand identity, brand managers and the whole branding team as they build the best brands. These great book contain best practices and practical advice. I hope that these titles will help you build your successful brand and deserve to be on your reading list for brand building..

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Additional learnings

From the 10 books included in this review, it seems that the following can work well for book authors:

–???????Structuring the book according to short “daily readings”.

–???????Have one clear main topic.

–???????Make a case for one topic repeatedly.

–???????A companion/second book should be a workbook.

–???????Involve a co-author(s) at some point in the series or editions.

–???????If you are first with a concept, it can run for decades.

–???????You can build your entire career based on a topic.

–???????Topic extension may be lucrative.

–???????Beautiful design.

–???????Clever titles.

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CHALLENGE TO YOU

Schedule focused reading time for brand, marketing and business books much like you schedule time to exercise, hopefully. Do it in quiet, take notes, ponder the content and implement as you go along. It’s not a race to get through as many books as possible, rather get the full benefit of the amazing content of these books.

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QUOTE

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest” – Benjamin Franklin

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Let’s BRAND FOR SUCCESS!

Pieter Steenkamp, BrandDoctor

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Meet Dr Pieter Steenkamp, your BRAND FOR SUCCESS guide.

I am actually a brand doctor with a PhD specialising in brand management from University of Stellenbosch Business School. As a brand management lecturer and researcher at a university in Cape Town South Africa and a regular visiting professor at universities in Germany, I stay up to date with the latest brand management developments. This affords me the incredible opportunity to consult with leaders of some of the most admired brands.

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