Building Brand Identity: A Strategy for Success in a Hostile Marketplace

I found this book to be extremely useful with its steps and strategies on, as the title states, building brand identity. Upshaw really delivers, and his case histories only serve to reinforce his ideas. Given how critical branding is nowadays, this book really delivers. It's a little out of date, though, but Guerilla PR: Wired compensated for that, handling some of the brand identity strategy techniques in today's digital age.

Upshaw's text hits the mark in two ways. It surveys a very complex, demanding environment and reduces it to several clear concepts. And it provides a range of examples, timeless ones, I think, that illustrate how the concepts are applied in the real world. Building Brand Identity reaches at least two different audiences, professionals who want new tools to evaluate their own brand management and the layperson/newcomer audience seeking to learn the techniques involved in brand development. The reader can use Upshaw's ideas as a business manual or as a tool to better understand what he calls a hostile marketplace. And both types of reader will be entertained along the way.

This is definitely a good book about building a brand identity in a competitive marketplace. Two chapters report some real world examples, updated to the end of 1994 (Nike, Burger King, Saturn and others). Considering the changes in the past three years in the e-world, this title lacks some more updated and recent information on the Web.