‘You are a fish – this is the truth about brands’ by Nick Liddell

An excellent, no nonsense, easy to read guide to the world of brands.

Edited snippets:

Brands exist because people can’t help humanising organisations.

The more we humanise something, the more we care about it. The more we humanise a business, the more we trust it.

Over time predictability is boring. Creating value involves discovery, imagination, transgression and play.

Brands help the organisations that own them operate with lower risk. They create value by influencing how different groups of people feel, think and act towards an organisation.

Brand positioning is essentially a compelling promise that marketers convey to win customers’ minds and hearts. Great brand positioning is the antidote to indifference.

The more clearly you articulate what you stand for and why you exist, the more you enhance your ability to adapt to change. Most people who use a brand have very little idea of what it stands for.

Don’t assume you need a world-changing ideal to become a great brand.

The best brand strategy is as little brand strategy as possible:

• Who do you want your brand to influence?
• Where and when will it do so?
• What will it compete with for their attention?
• Why should they care about it more than those competitors?

Your positioning asks a question that your brand strategy can then focus on answering, eg How will IKEA create a better everyday life for the many people?

Brand strategy is an expression of belief or opinion, not a statement of fact. It involves vision, imagination and empathy. Plus some form of a creative leap.

Really great brands marry substance with style. The more character a brand exhibits, the more likely people are to desire it.

Organisations that are willing to embrace plodding, unexceptional values open the door to plodding, unexceptional brands.

While it’s unrealistic to expect uniqueness from your positioning, every brand should cultivate its own, inimitable style.

Distinctive brand assets work like signatures. It’s absurd to suggest a signature is the most important part of a letter: it also needs to establish some sort of connection with its intended recipient.

The signature draws its power from the quality of the content that precedes it. And this is also true of brands.

There isn’t a logo design or strapline in the world that can compensate for unimaginative communication, lacklustre experiences and substandard products and services.

Great brands are built on continuous transgression, not repetition of past successes.

Brands are value-creators: they are ideas made real.

The better we become at distinguishing great ideas from the merely humdrum, the happier we will be as individuals, the more prosperous we will be as an economy and the more sustainable we will become as a society.