Connect with your Customers using the Brand Marketing Strategies from these Books

The primary difference between great brands and lackluster brands is that great brands wrap themselves in a story that connects directly with consumers.

Too many people try to be on every channel and cater to everyone. A brand is meant to last for years, so you have time to branch out both in channels and to people you’re serving. If you want to build a brand worth loving, and have a channel presence that matters, you need to prioritize. You need to pick a channel or two and crush that instead of being average at 10. You need to pick who you are serving and focus relentlessly on them. Talk to them, learn from them, build for them. To be effective, you need to be ruthlessly selective. Grow from there.

A timeless marketing book that helps organizations of all types develop a solid position that will allow them to increase their market share. If you haven’t read this book, then you are at serious disadvantage when trying to position yourself in the minds of your customers.

A thorough look at why organizations need to differentiate, what differentiation really means, and how to do it. Through practical examples of what works and what doesn’t, this book is essential reading for anyone responsible for marketing the brand.

Whether you are building a new brand or revitalizing an old one, this book is a must in today’s complex digital marketplace. With in-depth case studies and actionable advice, this book will help you perfect your brand so you can go to market more effectively.

I would highly recommend Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. It provides a fun framework to think through how your business presents itself. It also has a great mix of theoretical and practical. You can follow along as you read and walk away with a plan of action that you can begin to implement.

A fundamental paradigm shift has occurred in marketing and branding. Today the most successful CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs and enterprises set their sites on developing a long-term brand strategy instead of a short-term platform that supports and builds buzz for their personal or business brand. That’s really the key to the new business mindset — the recognition that branding and marketing are an ongoing, steady stream of small efforts within an overall strategy, not a series of gigantic pushes. The Brand Mapping Strategy shows how social media, blogging and other business development activities — both online and off — are about the persistent, ongoing process of building a platform, creating credibility and increasing the number of people that you funnel into your potential client and network pipeline.

This book is incredibly important because it uses deep research in a controlled environment (national, not global, brands in Australia) to reveal that much of what we have been taught about marketing is an illusion. The data points to truths that are hiding in plain sight – the importance of reach and frequency, the myth of brand loyalty, the risk of price promotions. For anyone involved in designing brand marketing campaigns, this book is a must-read.

Best for a smaller team where job roles blur across many avenues. It’scovers novice to experts with some gems of info in there for even the most experienced marketer. It covers the fundamentals to help reset the marketing palette. Leading onto processes in how to get things done, and done well. The case studies are comprehensive, allowing the reader to find a business/niche similar to themselves, so they can see a real-life example of what effective branding looks like and apply to their own company. This book has been a blueprint for how we have marketed our business and improved our branding. If you are in charge of a small and scrappy team that is responsible for a big branding task or rebrand, you need this book. The first section covers branding fundamentals in depth, in a manner that is useful to both novices and pros alike. The second section covers process basics, like how to apply those fundamentals to your projects. The third section is a comprehensive compendium of case studies that help you see how those processes can play out in the real world in a successful manner. Inside, you’ll find checklists and diagrams, 50 case studies, 700 illustrations and over 400 quotes from industry experts. As the design director of Coca-Cola put it, Designing Brand Identity is the book that first taught me how to build brands. For the past decade, it’s been my blueprint for using design to impact people, culture and business.

Before you start developing branding strategies, it’s helpful to have a conversation about what branding is and is not. What, exactly, is a brand? Is it a shiny logo, a clever mascot, a catchy slogan? Why should a company care about branding, and why should consumers care about branding? This book, written by expert design visionary Debbie Millman, of the popular podcast Design Matters, is a collection of interviews in conversation with leaders in their field, and examines these questions and more. After reading this book, you’ll have a better understanding of the state of modern branding, why it’s done and how consumers are impacted by the branding decisions of large companies (and vice-versa).

How Cool Brands Stay Hot instills in me that it’s not entirely negative to rebrand. Rebrand when needed, but do not compromise your company’s identity. One of the most vital takeaways I learned from this book is that you have to understand, from a business standpoint, that a generation drives the consumer market and how it progresses. Hence, your company’s brand has to adapt and be relevant to the current generation. Know your consumers. What do they value the most? For example, in this book, it focuses on millennials. Millennials value authenticity, so companies need to be more open and avoid implying that your brand is flawless.

Written by hugely respected Copywriter and Creative Director Ryan Wallman, this book takes a critical look at the marketing and advertising industry in the 21st century, asking what does it mean to be an effective marketer in the age of hustle porn and marketing gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk. Alongside some genuinely useful observations and advice, Wallman’s writing style is engaging and often, hilarious.

Learn how to go beyond simply selling your product, and start selling what you *believe*. In this eye-opening, practical book, Burkhart teaches you how to avoid being just another forgettable brand through creating your own unique (and memorable!) identity. Using case studies you’ll learn invaluable lessons about how to brand yourself right.