To run a successful business, you need to engage and inspire your employees. To do that, first clarify the promises and values that make up your organization’s identity core – then align the core with every aspect of the business. Drawing on his influential Harvard Business Review article, Mats Urde shows how to tackle this critically important task and forge a corporate brand identity that will boldly stand out from the competition. As a visual aid, he introduces the Corporate Brand Identity Matrix, a simple-to-use tool that ties the identity core to the organization’s mission, strategy, communications, and reputation, helping you create a coherent, clearly understandable whole that will fire employees’ imaginations and wow customers. The book is packed with stories and practical insights from renowned organizations like IKEA, Trek Bikes, Volvo, and the Nobel Prizes that struggled at first but eventually succeeded in motivating employees and winning over customers by defining the identity core. Whether you’re a board member, executive, or entrepreneur, this book offers you a roadmap to success.

Best-selling brand expert Marty Neumeier shows you how to make the leap from a company-driven past to the consumer-driven future. You’ll learn how to flip your brand from offering products to offering meaning, from value protection to value creation, from cost-based pricing to relationship pricing, from market segments to brand tribes, and from customer satisfaction to customer empowerment. In the 13 years since Neumeier wrote The Brand Gap, the influence of social media has proven his core theory: “A brand isn’t what you say it is – it’s what they say it is.” People are no longer consumers or market segments or tiny blips in big data. They don’t buy brands. They join brands. They want a vote in what gets produced and how it gets delivered. They’re willing to roll up their sleeves and help out – not only by promoting the brand to their friends, but by contributing content, volunteering ideas, and even selling products or services. At the center of the book is the Brand Commitment Matrix, a simple tool for organizing the six primary components of a brand. Your brand community is your tribe. How will you lead it?

A NEW YORK TIMES and WALL STREET JOURNAL bestseller 'A must read for entrepreneurs of all stripes' - Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup From three partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough business problems, proven at more than 100 companies. What’s the most important place to focus your effort? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? What will your idea look like in real life? How do you start? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint. Designer Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. He joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they have completed more than one hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more. A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.

If You Don’t Define Your Brand, Someone Else Will Define It for You Your small business is a brand. You as a business person are a brand! Imagine using a time-tested,strategic method to build your brandwith best practices for online marketing and more! Brand and marketing strategist Karen Tiber Leland helps entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs, and executives create a brand by design instead of default, gain greater influence in their industries and companies, and become thought leaders in their fields. The Brand Mapping Strategy uses proven strategies, best practices and anecdotes from real life brand-building successes to give readers the tools they need to design, build, and accelerate a successful brand. Readers will be able to: Develop an overall blueprint for their brand using the Brand Mapping Process® Determine which online tactics (and in what combination) will work for their brand Expand the current brand outreach and contribution to a bigger audience in their industry, community, or the world at large Become a thought or industry leader, using clear positioning, a specific strategy for brand building, and a method for implementation Leverage content effectively and efficiently to build their brand Develop a marketing and social media strategy using the right platform

In this compelling book, Gerard Hastings shines a light on the obsessive marketing techniques that are employed by crack marketing managers worldwide and explains how these not only feed the spectre of ever-growing levels of consumption, but also cause great social, economic and environmental problems. An accessible book which will be of interest across the social sciences and in particular for those marketing students who'd prefer a critical perspective to the standard ritualization of their discipline.

Globalization and social media have made the world smaller, more connected and infinitely more competitive. The world has changed. Have you? If you don't have the package that will take you to the next level of your career, you need to reinvent your personal brand. BrandingPays(TM), a practical guide to strategic personal branding, will help you refocus your skills and experience so you are the best candidate for the job, career and business opportunities that you desire. Perfect for professionals, entrepreneurs and college students, the step-by-step BrandingPays methodology has been proven in Fortune 500 companies and leading business schools. Former Regis McKenna Inc. Partner Karen Kang builds upon concepts and techniques from the legendary marketing firm that created and launched the Apple brand.

"When everybody zigs, zag," says Marty Neumeier in this fresh view of brand strategy. ZAG follows the ultra-clear "whiteboard overview" style of the author’s first book, THE BRAND GAP, but drills deeper into the question of how brands can harness the power of differentiation. The author argues that in an extremely cluttered marketplace, traditional differentiation is no longer enough—today companies need “radical differentiation” to create lasting value for their shareholders and customers. In an entertaining 3-hour read you’ll learn: - why me-too brands are doomed to fail - how to "read" customer feedback on new products and messages - the 17 steps for designing “difference” into your brand - how to turn your brand’s “onliness” into a “trueline” to drive synergy - the secrets of naming products, services, and companies - the four deadly dangers faced by brand portfolios - how to “stretch” your brand without breaking it - how to succeed at all three stages of the competition cycle From the back cover: In an age of me-too products and instant communications, keeping up with the competition is no longer a winning strategy. Today you have to out-position, out-maneuver, and out-design the competition. The new rule? When everybody zigs, zag. In his first book, THE BRAND GAP, Neumeier showed companies how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. In ZAG, he illustrates the number-one strategy of high-performance brands—radical differentiation. ZAG is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA. For a quick peek inside ZAG, go to www.zagbook.com.