Introduction

Whether you run a multinational or a social enterprise, a charity or a one-man-band, you have a brand.

Branding is all about deciding where you stand, and what makes you different from the others, then showing and telling the difference as clearly as you can to make you brand stand out.

Everything that a brand is and does forms part of its identity. Building a brand’s identity makes it more recognisable, familiar and reassuring—as long as you get it right. If it’s all going well, then people are more likely to chose your brand, use it and tell their friends about it.

Your branding is working when you’ve got people saying, “Yes, I know them. They’re the people who ...

“... have the big blue building in the centre of town.” “... make those delicious biscuits.” “... sponsor our football team.” “... designed my favourite jacket.” What’s important is that people remember the good things about your brand, come back to it or recommend it to people they know, and don’t get you mixed up with someone else.

In this book, there are 100 branding ideas; some are about brand strategy and some about specifi c actions you could take. Use them to give you direction, or to help evaluate the branding you’re already doing. You can read it from start to fi nish, or you can also pick a page at random.

All the stories are here to make a point, not just as anecdotes.

I use them to shed light on a situation that might arise again, and which you might approach differently for your own brand.

They won’t all be relevant to you right now but some of them will, and I do hope they give you something new to think about, debate and adapt for your own use.

Brands are people’s and organisations’ intellectual property, so you’ll have to adapt some of the examples I’ve written about before you can apply a similar idea to your own organisation. But that’s where innovation and creativity come in; defi ne what you can and can’t do, and this will help you to invent a your own solution to a particular problem. PS Point 101: Tell the truth. In these days of social media and the speed that news can travel around the Internet, if you try to put a glossy face on a grubby reality, you’ll get found out. The best branding comes from building a great organisation, then letting people know all about it.