Great Branding Books

If you're like me and always looking for a great read on business, branding or innovation, here are some of my favorite books to-date! I'm currently looking for some more great books to dive into, so please send me some recommendations!

Currently, I'm making my way through John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding. It's written in 17th Century English, so it's taking me quite a bit of time to work through, but the topic is interesting for sure.

Even though John Locke wasn't thinking about branding when he wrote his essay in the 1600's, he sure does make some good points on how we create strong brands!

He talks about how people begin to understand complex ideas - and that it takes consistent personal experiences with these ideas for us to understand what they are (i.e. the definition / perception for the complex idea).

I believe a brand is like a complex idea! Something you need to experience (either through purchasing its products or services, reading about its latest innovations, dealing with its people, etc.) to begin to comprehend what it stands for - this goes for both internally and externally of the organization. However, if these experiences contradict each other, people begin to struggle with understanding the idea. But, when the experiences work together and are all singing that same tune, people will better understand the definition of the complex idea - or in the case of brand, will better understand their positioning/competitive advantage within the market place!

Here are some of my favorite books I've read over the years:

The Brand Gap, by Marty Neumeier, was the first brand book I ever read. I must say it turned on my passion for this industry. I love all of Marty's books (Brand Gap, Zag & The Designful Company) as they are short and to the point, with lots of visuals that explain his thinking perfectly! I sometimes refer to his visuals in my posts - after all a picture is worth 1000 words!

Wally Olins: The Brand Handbook, is another great read that talks about the essentials of branding. He gets straight to the point about what is and isn't branding, and provides a good process on brand analysis and evaluation!

Brand & Branding is a great book talking about the value of branding. It's written by 17 experts who talk about branding best practices and the future of branding. I enjoyed this book because it provided me with some great content and rationale for the importance of branding, as I find sometimes organizations struggle to see the long-term benefits of focusing on their brand.

I wrote about Built to Last is a previous post, and what I liked about it, was that it wasn't written with branding in mind, but the entire books refers to what it takes to be a great organization - and what it takes is having a strong and meaningful brand purpose that will survive the ages. In fact, I think this is my favorite book to-date!

Buy-ology, by Martin Lindstrom, is a fun book to read! It was fascinating to learn that what we say and what we do are often very different things! In this book, Martin reveals the results of his in-depth neurological study into the real reasons why we act the way we do. I read this last year during the holidays and I couldn't put it down, as it was so intriguing!

So, those are some of my favorite books on branding! If you have any books that you would recommend I read, please share!!