Brand Atlas: Branding Intelligence Made Visible

A companys brand is its most valuable asset. Wheeler takes the most seminal tools used by a wide variety of thought leaders and practitioners and makes the information understandable, visible, relevant, exportable and applicable. With her bestselling debut book, Designing Brand Identity (Wall Street Journal, BestSeller, Spotlight 1/23/2011), now in its third edition, Alina Wheeler reinvented the marketing textbook using a straightforward style to help demystify the branding process. This new offering from Wheeler, Brand Atlas, builds on this userfriendly approach to aggregate and simplify the science behind branding with a unique visual teaching method suited for timecrunched professionals.Brand Atlas follows the recent YouTubeiPhonePecha Kucha era trend toward fastpaced visual instruction by neglecting needless jargon and combining vivid, fullcolor images and easytofollow diagrams to break down branding principles into basic stepbystep concepts that can be immediately applied. This handy reference: Speaks to a broad range of stakeholders in the branding processfrom CEOs to designers to brand managers Provides tools to integrate brand throughout the entire customer experience, build relationships based on brand, measure a brands value, and define a brand strategy Contains essential information illustrated through the use of diagramsWith diagrams designed by Joel Katz, an internationally known information designer and a global authority on the visualization of complex information, Brand Atlas is a compact, nononsense guide that shows how tactical innovation in the design process is crucial to building brand assets.More to Explore from the Book: Ten Imperatives for Branding SuccessBranding is big business. For most businesses, brands represent their most valuable asset, influencing customers, prospects, investors, and employees. Companies often go through a complex internal process to identify the best branding firms to partner with choosing from an array of global brand consultancies, design offices, or specialists in areas such as packaging, user experience, and social media.Why do some brand initiatives just fizzle after an initial investment of capital and resources? Whether you are a consumer brand, a nonprofit, or a midsize service business, the following imperatives ensure positive outcomes for your brand.1. Ensure that the leadership team endorses the brand initiative and understands the process. There must be a strong mandate from the top. If the commitment to revitalize the brand is tepid, the initiative will expire, and the investment will have no return.2. Establish clear goals and an endpoint. Why are we doing this? What are the deliverables? How will things be different at the end of the process? For example: we will have new branding guidelines to make it easier to communicate clearly and consistently about our brand to our customers and to our employees.3. Establish clear responsibilities. Acknowledge that your investment will require company time, not just writing checks to the consultants. Its a collaborative process, and will require leaderships focus. Identify an internal person whose job it is to be the direct contact for the branding firm. They have to be a make it happen person with superior organizational skills, and access to the key decision makers.4. Use a disciplined process with clear decision points and benchmarks. Agree on what the brand stands for before any creative work is done. Use a tool like the brand brief to ensure that key decision makers agree on your brands essence, its competitive advantage, your target market, and your value proposition.5. Stay customer centric. The best brand decisions can only be made with the customers needs and experiences in mind. See the world through the eyes of your customers.6. Commit to a small decision group that has the power to make the pivotal decisions that impact the brand. Do not bring in new decisionm