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

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: The text and images are superbly woven into a profoundly simple and effective message. Refreshingly straightforward on the surface and equally so in reflection. One of the few books I've enjoyed reading and using as reference. The "take-home lessons" and "recommended reading" sections were nice touches.

Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: This book defies categorization. It's a business book, but it's designed and illustrated like an art book. It's thoroughly grounded in research, but you can read the whole book in an afternoon. Clearly, none of these traits is an accident. Neumeier is using the book to demonstrate one of the tenets of his thesis: When companies combine the "logic" of strategy with the "magic" of creativity, they find that "1+1=11". What's reassuring about THE BRAND GAP is its insistence that branding is not about building a facade to hoodwink the hapless customer, but embedding respect for the customer at every level of the company. I bought this book to read on the plane, and as I boarded I saw two other people with the same book!

Rating:
Summary: Old Hat
Review: This book is concise. And I'm thankful for that. The content in this book is boring and lacks direction. The Brand Gap merely provides an laconic reiteration of fundamental marketing principles that most educated readers should be thoroughly familiar with. This disappointing book provides no innovative material and really doesn't provide any tangible arguments for bridging the brand gap.

Rating:
Summary: nice easy read.
Review: This is an easy book, filled with a lot of fluff and buzz and tasty grapics. The book is small, and can be enjoyed in one sitting. That said, i like this book. There is no deep thinking or new discoveries within the covers, and if you are looking for a "destination", you will not find one. But if you are willing to enjoy a small journey into the land of brands then you will find beauty and grace and be rewarded for that. A refreshing read, some of the things we all know, some are new found discoveries.... My company is doing web and graphic design and multimedia, and lots of our people like this book very much.

Rating:
Summary: One huge idea
Review: Those who characterize The Brand Gap is a primer are missing the point. While the book does condense and clarify many existing theories of branding, it contributes one huge idea that has never been adequately addressed---namely, that unless strategy is connected to customer delight, there IS no brand. There's just a great business strategy that no one can see, or else there's a feel-good image that isn't based on business reality. Either extreme leads eventually to brand failure. In addition to the core idea of this book, I found a number of subordinate ideas that seem extremely fresh in the marketing world: the changing requirements for trademarks and identities, the collaborative brand-building model, and the need for Chief Brand Officers to coordinate the work, to name a few. The book may seem simple, but its simplicity is deceptive. I loved it so much that I attended one of Neumeir's workshops and was not disappointed. Both the book and the workshop are perfect examples of branding in action. They're different, collaborative, innovative, tested, and they lead to sustainable business success. Great stuff.