The Brand Gap: Revised Edition

It's a book that because of the way it's written allows the reader to have fun and learn quickly about little things that will either help you grow or avoid a huge problem on branding or future brands. Very easy to read. You'll finish the book before you get bored. Anyone trying to look for a Marketing Crash Course on branding should read this book.

if you want a quick and entertaining way of understanding what is a brand in the modern sense of the word, get this book. Even if you know already what "brand" and "branding" mean, this book will reset your brain into rethinking your business and where you are going with it. It is a must read for anyone involved in selling stuff or services out of an established franchise or license.

I am not a CEO, owner, entrepreneur, SVP of marketing, nor do I work in a company struggling to turn a fourth-tier brand into a world beater. Those are the native audiences for this wonderful, finish-it-in-a-plane-ride book. I'm a writer and consultant trying to explain branding to fundraisers, and what I intensely like about Marty Neumeier's brief "whiteboard overview" (his phrase) of branding is that it answers ALL my questions about branding and brand strategy quickly, simply, with nicely selected examples. It starts with what branding is NOT (not your logo, not your visual ID, not your products). Then it defines what it truly is, "A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or company." That's in the first couple of pages. But of course there's so much more. I love a good, insight-rich how-to book the way others love a good mystery. The Brand Gap is among the best.

A good book is one that not only provides an interesting read, but gets you off the dime to DO something. Our company is large (40,000 employees)and we had ahuge gap between business and brand. After reading this book, my team and I re-org'd our company around the "superteam" model of brand building. Now we have cross-deparmental collaboration, plus a stable of small, best of breed external firms to give us some creative horsepower. The left brain's finally connected to the right brain, to quote Neumeier's phrase. We use the book to introduce new hires to the brand concept, then follow up with training on our own brand. This is the book that got us going. I recommend it to anyone who wants to incite change in their organization.

Those who characterize The Brand Gap is a primer are missing the point. While the book does condense and clarify many existing theories of branding, it contributes one huge idea that has never been adequately addressed---namely, that unless strategy is connected to customer delight, there IS no brand. There's just a great business strategy that no one can see, or else there's a feel-good image that isn't based on business reality. Either extreme leads eventually to brand failure. In addition to the core idea of this book, I found a number of subordinate ideas that seem extremely fresh in the marketing world: the changing requirements for trademarks and identities, the collaborative brand-building model, and the need for Chief Brand Officers to coordinate the work, to name a few. The book may seem simple, but its simplicity is deceptive. I loved it so much that I attended one of Neumeir's workshops and was not disappointed. Both the book and the workshop are perfect examples of branding in action. They're different, collaborative, innovative, tested, and they lead to sustainable business success. Great stuff.