Author: Marty Neumeier
Publisher: New Riders Press
Year Published: 2003
Rating: 
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‘Brand’ is probably one of the most hyped words in marketing today. Everyone talks about ‘building your brand’ but what does that really mean?
In The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier takes a clear shot at defining this often misunderstood marketing principle and nails his target. The result is an easy-to-read overview of what a brand is and how you can get one.
Neumeier starts by defining what a brand is not – it isn’t a logo. It isn’t your corporate identity system complete with fonts and colors. And it’s not your product. Rather,
A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. It’s a GUT FEELING because we’re all emotional, intuitive beings, despite our best efforts to be rational. It’s a PERSON’S gut feeling, because in the end the brand is defined by individuals, not by companies, markets, or the so-called general public…
In other words, a brand is not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.
The problem lies in how you communicate to your prospects and clients. Marketing people tend to be left brained people who are looking for strategy, numbers and ways to analyze success, while the creative people are the right brained people who want to be left alone to come up with the next cool idea. This disconnect between strategically focused left brainers and creative right brainers is called the brand gap.
After defining this problem that plagues many corporations, Neumeier gives companies a five step way close the gap. It starts with answering three fundamental questions:
1. Who are you?
2. What do you do?
3. Why does it matter?
Most firms can answer the first question with few problems. The second question is a bit more challenging, and the third is where many firms stumble. Yet, if you can’t offer a compelling answer to each of those questions, you don’t have a brand. This is the differentiating step to creating a brand.
Step two is the collaborating phase. You can’t build your brand by yourself. It requires getting numerous people within your organization working with your creative firms, ad agencies, research companies, and strategy consultants on the same page about who you are, what you do, and why it matters.
Step three is the innovation phase. This phase is resembles Seth Godin’s Free Prize because it requires you to think beyond the subtleties and really do something that makes an impact.
Would-be leaders in any industry must come to grips with a self-evident truth – you can’t be a leader by following. Admittedly, it’s difficult to zag when every bone in your body says zig. Human beings are social animals – our natural inclination is to go with the group.
Creativity, however, demands the opposite. It requires an unnatural act. To achieve originality we need to abandon the comforts of habit, reason, and the approval of our peers, and strike out in new directions. In the world of branding, creativity doesn’t require reinventing the wheel, but simply thinking in fresh ways. It requires looking for what industrial designer Raymond Loewy called MAYA – the Most Advanced Yet Acceptable solution.
Step four is the validation phase. Here’s where you listen to and receive feedback from prospects and clients. This phase is about testing your idea to see how well it works and where you might be able to improve it. Neumeier cautions against using focus groups as the absolute word on whether the idea will work, but research and focus groups can point you in the right direction.
The validation state also revolves around packaging your product. Good packaging is distinctive, meaning you can cover the logo on an advertisement or brochure and still know which company it represents. Think Apple or even Johnson &; Johnson. Everything they do is distinctive. Now, take out a few of your brochures – can you cover up your logo and tell that your piece represents you? Or could you put your competitor’s logo there – or even the logo from a firm outside your industry?
The final stage is cultivation. Your brand should be like your business – a process, not a static entity that never changes. Brands evolve. How you manage that evolution will determine whether your brand gains or loses value.
The Brand Gap is a must read for anyone interested in building a better brand. It offers solid advice for companies of all sizes – and best of all, shows that companies can bridge the gap between strategy and creative. The two sides of the coin often fight over which method is better: left brainers look to direct response and measuring every last detail of a campaign while right brainers appeal to emotion and are looking for innovation and creativity over lengthy reports and numbers. Great brands require that these two sides work together.
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