The Medicine Cabinet for Your Brand

I know, I know, two book reviews in two months. This is what happens when you take all the books from beside the bed on a camping trip. A few help the fire and a few come back full of scribbles and dog-eared pages. Brand Aid is one of those books.

Let me say upfront that this is not a book you should sit down and read, say on your next camping trip. It’s not meant to be; it’s meant to be a handy reference for your brand problems.  Let’s dive in:

First, go get a pen or open up Evernote and write this down: “Brand equity is a reservoir of goodwill.”

This is going to come in very handy when some Keebler Elf in the finance department is busy trimming the marketing budget and you’re on the spot to define brand equity.

In this newest edition of Brand Aid, Brad VanAuken takes us from soup to nuts in the brand department. From what is a brand to how it should be managed to how it should be measured, this is a very detailed handbook. No, I take that back, it’s a text book. If you teach branding, you should add this to your reading list.

If you are new to brand marketing this is a terrific primer and should serve you well for years. Building on his long career with Hallmark Cards and later with Element K and The Blake Project, VanAuken walks through every aspect of building and managing a brand. You’ll learn about hiring an ad agency to setting your marketing mix, to the many fun approaches to research and equity calculations.

If you’ve been kicking around a while, most of this will be a refresher, with some good war stories from the greeting card industry.

The chapters are short and sub-divided nicely, for those of us who are easily distracted, and most include some thorough checklists. The writing style is a bit dry and teachy for my taste, but it’s meant as a reference, not a novel and so that makes it readable.

My favourite take-aways are around how we explain brands and why we bother paying attention to them at all. The metaphor from the very beginning is quite splendid:

Brand building activities consistently pursued over time will ensure that the reservoir remains full. Neglecting those activities or taking actions that might deplete those reserves will reduce the reservoir, imperceptibly at first, but soon all too noticeably unit it is too late and all that is left is mud.

The other key bits I’m using include the overview of a brand audit and the figure from right at the end which highlights the benefits of a strong brand.

Other must-reads include the chapter on brand design and the section in Part 3 on persuasive communications.

The Blake Project site, sadly, offers little in the way of resources, but you can order the book and, of course, hire them to work on your brand.

I don’t usually keep most of the books I read, even the ones I like, but this book has already found its way to my reference shelf.

Related Posts

The End of the Line for the Tagline
Why Meaning Matters More Than Noise

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter