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A few days ago, I went on a little road trip to Fredericksburg, Texas. I was out visiting the strategic design firm Morgan Mohon. We had a lot of great conversations, one of which was a recommendation to read The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier.

I was skeptical at first. The Morgan Mohon boys assured me that it would not only be a good read, but that it would provide tons of insight into their practice and the world of strategic branding.

(To give you some additional background, I’m the techie guy who sits in the back of the meeting and rolls his eyes whenever the marketing guys come in the room and start talking about brand research and brand platforms and extending the brand and eating brand muffins and on and on….)

However, I’m a skeptic, and not a cynic (the difference being that a cynic is a romantic with a broken heart and a skeptic is just that annoying fellow who repeatedly asks Why? until you want to punch him in the nose). When I got back to Austin, I went to Borders and got myself a copy for around $20.

The book is very short, around 190 pages mit glossary (I read it all in about an hour). There are lots of pages dominated by graphics that drive home the author’s points about branding. The author states in his preface that instead of regaling his reader with exhaustive (and exhausting) stuff about brands, he would take a cue from the world of whiteboarding and prototyping to drive home his message.

Essentially, his take on branding is pretty common-sensical. Branding is what fills the gap between business strategy and actual design of collateral, logos, web sites, etc. Branding is not about logos, trademarks, or icons (although they are part of the mix); rather, it’s more about how the customer feels about your company, product, or service way down in their gut. If you have a great logo, beautiful brochures, and an award-winning web site, but your sales reps are snotty and the customer service guys are rude, you have a brand problem brewing on the horizon.

Of course, the author (and I) wouldn’t be happy if branding was all about some kind of elusive magic. There’s just no way that you can put me in a room with an ostrich, a chocolate cake, three hackeysacks and a random number generator and expect me to brainstorm my way to some kind of brand breakthrough. Measurable, scientific, left-brain ways exist to make brands great–and what’s even cooler is that all this left-brain stuff can be combined with the right-brain stuff to make magic happen. He goes through five methods in the book: differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate, and cultivate. Although this seems like a lot of “ates,” each section had effective, tangible tidbits that made me go “ahhhhh!”

For example, the section on collaboration had the best explanation I’ve ever seen on how companies choose to manage their brands. Essentially, it all comes down to creating a network of brand stewards. Some companies keep it all in house, others use a ginormous agency to manage every aspect of a brand (web, logos, stationery, media buys, PR, packaging, etc etc), and still others hire a strategic brand firm that then outsources to other players (web to Triple Dog Dare Media, for instance).

Some of you in marketing land are reading this blog post and going, “Well, duh!” Honestly, though, coming at this industry from the perspective of a software guy, a lot of what happens doesn’t make a lot of sense. Now it finally does. That’s one of the things I love about this book–all those loosy-goosy terms like brand equity, touchpoints, and metateams start making sense once I have a conceptual model for them. (Okay, I still think metateams is pretty funny. Only a few years ago I called the metateam arrangement “an agency with subcontractors”.)

I also thoroughly enjoyed the section on validation. Most of what the author says on the subject aligns well with what we know to be true in the world of usability studies. Stop the focus groups, people, you’ll get skewed results. Instead, rely on one-to-one interviews and ethnographic studies to keep the bias down.

The first section, on differentiation, made me reexamine a lot of things I took for granted about our own brand. The three questions (Who are we? What do we do? Why should others care?) really are a bit hard to answer, and if you give them the time and attention they deserve, can lead to good things. (Sorry, Martha.)

In any case, I’m not one who gives a lot of thought to brands. That doesn’t mean I’m immune to them. If I think about it, I’m very attached to brands. I love my Tag Heuer watch. I drive a Honda. My wife swears by her Volvo. My very first SLR was a Pentax, and I’ve owned three others. Although I also own a Canon digital camera, I’m thinking that my first Digital SLR will be a Pentax. Why? Dunno. I guess I’m attached to the brand.

Or maybe I like to think of myself as being part of the Tag tribe, the Pentax tribe. Maybe being part of those groups says something essential about me. Yes, I’m a Linux guy, and with that brand alignment/affiliation comes the kind of shorthand that makes me the wrong guy to invite to a Microsoft sales presentation. (Long story.) I loved Marty Neumeier’s section on tribalism, by the way–essentially, the busier companies get tearing down barriers to build McLuhan’s global village, the more people erect cozier barriers of their own using the brands they love.

To paraphase John Lennon, brand is what happens while you’re making other plans, I guess.

PS. I’m still a big believer in Eugene Schwartz’s central thesis: everything creative about a product, service, or company already exists as an intrinsic part of that thing. There’s no need to bring your own wacky creativity into it–all you have to do is chip away at the product, service, or company to discover what that thing is. What branding tells us is that a shortcut exists to discovering that essential thing: the way the customer feels about the product/service/widget/thingie.

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