The Brand Gap
Author: Marty Neumeier
Release: January 24, 2003
Tagline: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design
Publisher: New Riders Publishing
Genre: Business, Marketing
ISBN-10: 0735713308
ISBN-13: 9780735713307
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Despite time gap, Brand Gap still holds relevant marketing truths
Quotes and Lines
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 get feeling, because in the end the brand is defined by individuals, not by companies, markets, or the so-called general public. Each person creates his or her own version of it.
Brand management is the management of differences, not as they exist on data sheets, but as they exist in the minds of people.
For most of us, brand happens while we’re doing something else.
…demand unambiguous answers to three little questions:
1) Who are you?
2) What do you do?
3) Why does it matter?
The faster globalism removes barriers, the faster people erect new ones.
Brands are the little gods of modern life, each ruling a different need, activity, mood, or situation. Yet you’re in control. If your latest god falls from Olympus, you can switch to another one.
Innovation requires creativity, and creativity gives many business people a twitch.
Audiences want more than logic.
Perfection? It never existed. Control? Fuhgetaboudit. As entrepreneurial consultant Guy Kawasaki advises his clients: “Don’t worry, be crappy.” Let the brand live, breathe, make mistakes, be human. Instead of trying to present a Teflon-smooth surface, project a three-dimensional personality, inconsistencies and all. Brands can afford to be inconsistent–as long as they don’t abandon their defining attributes.
A brand is not a logo.