Tetoro's Lair

The Brand Gap, Revised Edition : Review Part I

I have been reading an interesting book about branding, and how to carefully choose the path leading to the recognition of your company, products and/or services : The Brand Gap, Revised Edition, written by Marty Neumeier.

 

The first point I noted was the obvious definition you need to have about what a brand is.
As described in the book, this idea comes from people’s thoughts on the product, the service and/or the company. It is for the people to decide and define what a brand represents and what values it carries. The necessity of a strong brand influence also comes from the fact that people need to clearly identify the differences between the products/services from several brands in order to make their choice. Now branding is the word used by the companies to name the management of the corporate image to make it positively different.

Another interesting point was the one analysing today’s world and how companies should behave with an information-rich and time-poor society. Nowadays, it matters to people to be able to quickly choose the products and/or services they are about to use. In order to do so, people need to highlight the main differences between those goods ; and companies need to be trustworthy enough for the customers to rely on them.

Thus, an eye-catching visual identity should be the first step in building a brand. This visual formation/transformation is the most useful tool for a company to accomplish the first differentiation from its competitors in the people’s minds.
Then, to go further on the path leading to represent an exceptional brand, the next step would be to complete the positioning statement as follow :

• For (customer definition)
• The (company)
• Is a (area of specialization)
• To provide (product/service)
• Because it possesses (knowledge, means, ideas…)
• Adding (unique features)
• For customers to (sense of feeling)

Or as the author of the book wrote it :

1. What are you?
2. What do you do?
3. Why does it matter?

Then, as shorter is better in order to be less time consuming for the future customer, the answers to these questions should be in the simplest form. This shall then simplify the work to establish the brand culture. Now, this differs for big companies, as they have branches in different sectors, they should establish a brand for each one of them in order to clearly state the purpose of each one of them.