‘Zag’ by Marty Neumeier
A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or company.
Brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.
It’s customers, not companies, who decide which brands live and which ones die.
The marketplace is crowded by five forms of clutter: products, features, advertising, messages, media. Too often companies try to fight competition with more clutter, when what they need is to ‘zag’, through radical differentiation.
Radical differentiation doesn’t test well in focus groups.
“We all agree that your idea is crazy. What divides us is whether it is crazy enough,” physicist Niels Bohr in response to a controversial paper.
To zag you still need rigour and process, otherwise you’ll drift from one thought to the next.
The first step in building a brand is to look inside and see where the raw energy will come from.
Articulate your core purpose – the reason your company exists beyond making money – in no more than twelve words.
When focus and differentiation are powered by a trend, the result is a charismatic brand that customers wouldn’t trade for love nor money.
Define your company by what makes it UNIQUE, not what makes it admirable. “The biggest winner is not the brand that is first into the marketplace, but the one that’s first into people’s minds.” (Ries & Trout)
‘Onliness’ is the true test of a zag – our brand is the ONLY X that offers Y. If you can’t say you’re the only, start again.
Sometimes the enemy is not a competing company, but the old way of doing things.
A strong brand name is different, brief, appropriate, easy to spell, satisfying to pronounce, suitable for ‘brandplay’ and legally defensible.
All brand communications should emanate from the one true thing you can say about your brand, that your competitors can’t claim and that your customers find valuable and credible.
Focus on a single proposition – one proposition per brand.
Real loyalty can’t be bought, it can only be earned. It starts with companies being loyal to customers.
Brand portfolios face four dangers that single brands don’t – contagion, confusion, contradiction and complexity. Extensions can cripple a brand by confusing customers.
When mental models go unquestioned, the culture stiffens. “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt, until they are too strong to be broken,” Samuel Johnson.
The central problem of brand building:
How do you get a complex organisation to execute a simple idea?