Book Summary: The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier

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What Is The Brand Gap About?

The Brand Gap is about creating a brand identity that resonates across every aspect of your business.

The Five Big Ideas

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company
Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity
The foundation of a brand is trust
The value of your brand grows in direct proportion to how quickly and easily customers can say yes to your offering
A charismatic brand is any product, service, or company for which people believe there’s no substitute.

The Brand Gap Summary

On Branding

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or company. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.

Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity. It’s not the process of connecting good strategy with poor creativity, poor strategy with good creativity, or poor strategy with poor creativity.

The foundation of a brand is trust. Customers trust your brand when their expectations consistently meet or beat their expectations.

Modern society is information-rich and time-poor. The value of your brand grows in direct proportion to how quickly and easily customers can say yes to your offering.

People base their buying decisions more on symbolic cues than features, benefits, and price. Make sure your symbols are compelling.

Only one competitor can be the cheapest—the others have to use branding. The stronger the brand, the greater the profit margin.

A charismatic brand is any product, service, or company for which people believe there’s no substitute. Any brand can be charismatic, even yours.

The 5 Disciplines of Branding

A charismatic brand can be defined as any product, service, or company for which people believe there is no substitute. Any brand, backed by enough courage and imagination, can become a charismatic brand if it masters the five disciplines of branding.

Differentiate
Collaborate
Innovate
Validate
Cultivate

1. Differentiate

To begin building your brand, ask yourself three questions:

Who are you?
What do you do?
Why does it matter?

Our brains filter our irrelevant information, letting in only what’s different and useful. Tell me again, why does your product matter?

Differentiation has evolved from a focus on “what it is,” to “what it does,” to “how you’ll feel,” to “who you are.” While features, benefits, and price are still important to people, experiences and personal identity are even more important.

As globalism removes barriers, people erect new ones. They create tribes—intimate worlds they can understand and participate in. Brand names are tribal gods, each ruling a different space within the tribe.

Become the number one or number two in your space. Can’t be number one or number two? Redefine your space or move to a different tribe.

2. Collaborate

Over time, specialists beat generalists. The winner is the brand that best fits a given space. The law of the jungle? Survival of the fittest.

How a brand should fit its space is determined by the brand community. It takes a village to build a brand.

By asking left-brainers and right-brainers to work as a team, you bridge the gap between logic and magic. With collaboration, one plus one equals eleven.

For successful precedents to creative collaboration, look to Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the cathedral builders of the Renaissance.

As creative firms become more collaborative, they’re also becoming more specialized. The next economy will see a rise in branding networks—groups of “unbundled” companies cooperating across the value chains.

The basic models have emerged for managing brand collaboration:
- The one-stop-shop;
- The brand agency; and
- The integrated marketing team.

Choose any one or create a combination.

Speak in prototypes. Prototypes cut through marketing red tape and let gut feeling talk to gut feeling.

3. Innovate

It’s design, not strategy, that ignites passion in people. And the magic behind better design and better business is innovation.

Radical innovation has the power to render competition obsolete. The innovator’s mantra: when everyone zigs, zag.

How do you know when an idea is innovative? When it scares the hell out of you.

Expectation innovation from people outside the company, or from people inside the company who THINK outside.

Make sure the name of your brand is distinctive, brief, appropriate, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, likable, extendible, and protectable.

Logos are dead. Long live icons and avatars.

Packing is the last and best chance to influence a prospect this side of the checkout counter. Arrange all your packaging messages in a “natural reading sequence.”

Avoid the three most common barriers to web innovation: technophobia, turfismo, and featuritis.

Bottom line: If it’s not innovative, it’s not magic.

4. Validate

The standard communication model is an antique. Transform your brand communication from a monologue to a dialogue by getting feedback.

Feedback, i.e. audience research, can inspire and validate innovation.

Research has gotten an unfair rap from the creative community. Though bad research can be like looking at the road in a rearview mirror, good research can get brands out of reverse and onto the Autobahn.

Use focus groups to FOCUS the research, not BE the research. Focus groups are particularly susceptible to the Hawthorne effect, which happens when people know they’re being tested.

Quantitative research is antithetical to inspiration. For epiphanies that lead to breakthroughs, use qualitative research.

Measure your company’s brand expressions for distinctiveness, relevance, memorability, extendibility, and depth.

5. Cultivate

Your business is not an entity but a living organism. Ditto your brand. Alignment, not consistency, is the basis of a living brand.

A living brand is a never-ending play, and every person in the company is an actor. People see the play whenever they experience the brand, and then they tell others.

Every brand contributor should develop a personal shockproof brandometer. No decision should be made without asking, “Will it help or hurt the brand?”

The growing importance of the brand has a flip side: its growing vulnerability. A failed launch, a drop in quality, or a whiff of scandal can damage credibility.

Editor’s Note

Noah J. Goldstein, Robert Cialdini, and Steve J. Martin have research to suggest otherwise. In their book, Yes!, the authors found that, in one study, the public’s perception of a company was more forgiving when the companies admitted their mistakes and followed up with a plan to put things right.

The more collaborative a brand becomes, the more centralized its management needs to be. The future of branding will require strong CBOs—chief brand officers who can steward the brand from inside the company.

Branding is a process that can be studied, analyzed, learned, taught, replicated, and managed.

It’s the CBO’s job to document and disseminate brand knowledge, and to transfer it while to each new manager and collaborator.

Each lap around the branding circle, from differentiation to cultivation, takes the brand further from commoditization and closer to a sustainable competitive advantage.