The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design

"It’s partly because it’s got a nice, informal definition of what a brand is. Marty Neumeier describes it as a person’s ‘gut feeling’ about a product or a service or a company. It’s that almost instant, non-intellectual sense that people have of products and services. I like that definition. The other reason that I like it is that Marty Neumeier is a designer by background and has a design-thinking way of looking at things. That means the book is very beautifully designed. There are very simple, really clever, useful diagrams in it, and the whole thing has a kind of intellectual beauty to it… “Branding is a very powerful force, and like most powerful forces, it can be used for good or ill” What he’s interested in—and the reason it’s called The Brand Gap —is the gap between the left-brain deliberations of strategy people and the right-brain creativity of design people and the need to bring those two together. So when branding is successful, it uses creativity, right-brain stuff, in order to help an organisation achieve its strategy, left-brain stuff. It’s a nice clear thought. That’s what I always like in a book: clarity of thought, and when that thought is visualised in a helpful way, I really love that. It’s very readable, and in fact—I’m not sure it’s even out yet—but most recently Marty is writing a novel about business. So he’s absolutely, instinctively, a storyteller. Given how interesting branding is, it’s surprising how many unreadable books there are on the subject. This one is really readable. Yes, which is right. For a very strong brand like Apple, what they say it is is very close to what Apple says it is. For a weak brand, what they say it is is a long way away from what the company wants it to be. So you can think of branding as the task of trying to bring those two things together so that what ‘they’ think is is as close as possible to what you think it is. Yes, but it’s an indirect thing. You can’t directly manipulate—at the moment anyway—what’s in people’s minds, but you can influence that through a whole range of branding activities: from designing a logo through to thinking about communication, the design of the product itself, the culture inside the company that produces the product. All of those different branding activities will, over time, have an influence on what ‘they’ say about you. Our particular view is that branding has to be an expression of the truth—because consumers will see through it very rapidly if it isn’t—and that that truth comes from inside the organisation. So it’s natural to spend a lot of time with people inside it. When we’re working on creating a brand, that’s not done by us deciding what it should be. It’s done by us running workshops that are sufficiently stimulating and provocative to help the client formulate what it is that they’re all about."