BrandSimple: How the Best Brands Keep It Simple and Succeed

True to such observations as "Simple trumps everything," Adamson boils down his 25-plus years of experience in brand development to provide six clear steps to understanding what makes a good brand. Along the way, the current managing director for Landor Associates (a firm within Young & Rubicam) discusses how to sync branding signals with the "brand idea" to serve a company's business strategy. Using examples such as Apple and FedEx, he explains how the brand idea can be turned into an internal rallying cry so that the message is reinforced in the packaging and employees pass it along to current and potential customers. Throughout, he provides a dynamic first-person commentary on the thought process and activities that went into creating and repositioning iconic brands like American Express, HBO and eBay, though it can be odd in cases where he wasn't personally involved. Unlike other branding gurus, Adamson doesn't celebrate the industry's mystique and keeps his discussion jargon-free. The charts and graphs are immediately understandable and the exercises doable. The result is an unusually readable how-to book that will help anyone involved with branding understand what works and why. (Oct.)