"When everybody zigs, zag," says Marty Neumeier in this fresh view of brand strategy. ZAG follows the ultra-clear "whiteboard overview" style of the author's first book, THE BRAND GAP, but drills deeper into the question of how brands can harness the power of differentiation. The author argues that in an extremely cluttered marketplace, traditional differentiation is no longer enough-today companies need "radical differentiation" to create lasting value for their shareholders and customers. In an entertaining 3-hour read you'll learn: - why me-too brands are doomed to fail - how to "read" customer feedback on new products and messages - the 17 steps for designing "difference" into your brand - how to turn your brand's "onliness" into a "trueline" to drive synergy - the secrets of naming products, services, and companies - the four deadly dangers faced by brand portfolios - how to "stretch" your brand without breaking it - how to succeed at all three stages of the competition cycle From the back cover: In an age of me-too products and instant communications, keeping up with the competition is no longer a winning strategy. Today you have to out-position, out-maneuver, and out-design the competition. The new rule? When everybody zigs, zag. In his first book, THE BRAND GAP, Neumeier showed companies how to bridge the distance between business strategy and design. In ZAG, he illustrates the number-one strategy of high-performance brands-radical differentiation. ZAG is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA. For a quick peek inside ZAG, go to www.zagbook.com.

Best-selling brand expert Marty Neumeier shows you how to make the leap from a company-driven past to the consumer-driven future. You'll learn how to flip your brand from offering products to offering meaning, from value protection to value creation, from cost-based pricing to relationship pricing, from market segments to brand tribes, and from customer satisfaction to customer empowerment. In the 13 years since Neumeier wrote The Brand Gap, the influence of social media has proven his core theory: "A brand isn't what you say it is - it's what they say it is." People are no longer consumers or market segments or tiny blips in big data. They don't buy brands. They join brands. They want a vote in what gets produced and how it gets delivered. They're willing to roll up their sleeves and help out - not only by promoting the brand to their friends, but by contributing content, volunteering ideas, and even selling products or services. At the center of the book is the Brand Commitment Matrix, a simple tool for organizing the six primary components of a brand. Your brand community is your tribe. How will you lead it?

THE BRAND GAP is the first book to present a unified theory of brand-building. Whereas most books on branding are weighted toward either a strategic or creative approach, this book shows how both ways of thinking can unite to produce a "charismatic brand"-a brand that customers feel is essential to their lives. In an entertaining two-hour read you'll learn: * the new definition of brand * the five essential disciplines of brand-building * how branding is changing the dynamics of competition * the three most powerful questions to ask about any brand * why collaboration is the key to brand-building * how design determines a customer's experience * how to test brand concepts quickly and cheaply * the importance of managing brands from the inside * 220-word brand glossary From the back cover: Not since McLuhan's THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE has a book compressed so many ideas into so few pages. Using the visual language of the boardroom, Neumeier presents the first unified theory of branding-a set of five disciplines to help companies bridge the gap between brand strategy and customer experience. Those with a grasp of branding will be inspired by the new perspectives they find here, and those who would like to understand it better will suddenly "get it." This deceptively simple book offers everyone in the company access to "the most powerful business tool since the spreadsheet."