The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
For years I’ve been hostile to branding. It felt like smoke-and-mirrors, a relic from the golden age of advertising with no place in our brave new online world.
The Brand Gap changed my mind overnight. It bridges the gap between strategy (logic) and creativity (magic) and is structured around five activities – differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate, cultivate.
But the twist comes with Marty Neumeier’s (re)definition of branding:
“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about
a product, service or company”
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
This focus on feeling makes it a call-to-arms for user experience designers.
Convince people to focus
User experience people are fond of saying that if you design for everybody, you design for no one. This question of focus is one of our key battlegrounds and, let’s face it, one where we often lose.
The Brand Gap tackles focus head on. Marty admits that focusing means giving up on potential customers. But if this lets you dominate a small category instead of trailing the leaders in a big one it’s worth it:
History has shown that it pays handsomely to be number one in your category – first, because of higher margins, and second, because the risk of commoditization is almost nonexistent.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
More money with less risk of fighting to the bottom on price? Sounds like a convincing business strategy to me.
Make new friends
The parallels with UX design go beyond focus and differentiation though:
- for brand research, qualitative techniques like 1:1 interviews, ethnographic research and field tests are preferred to focus groups and quantitative studies.
- branding uses prototypes – in the form of creative briefs and mockups – to quickly test and refine the gut feelings necessary for success.
- a clear visual hierarchy – or ‘natural reading order’ as it’s called here – is important in everything from packaging design to websites.
- brand people need to be natural facilitators, as creating a charismatic brand needs thousands of people to work together over a long period.
These shared techniques should make branding and user experience people natural allies – a refreshing change from the idea that marketing is the enemy.
Discover a new history
User experience designers know plenty about the history of design but rarely talk about the story of branding and advertising. Which is a shame, because advertisers were talking about designing experiences back in the 1950s.
The Brand Gap positions itself within this wider tradition. Marty Neumeier even provides a list of “rewarding and true” books at the back, saying:
The ideas in The Brand Gap are like a group of islands whose foundations extend below the surface of the page:
What you see are only the peaks.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap
If Positioning and Selling the Invisible are typical, learning about the history of branding will be extremely rewarding for user experience people.
Why you should read it
The Brand Gap is a perfect introduction to branding. Marty Neumeier combines ideas you already love into a story you won’t forget. Read it.
Let me know what you think about this review on @myddelton.