Entrepreneur's Guide To The Lean Brand: How Brand Innovation Builds Passion, Transforms Organizations and Creates Value

by Jeremiah Gardner, @Fakegrimlock (Illustrations), Brant Cooper (With)

Thousands of startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprise corporations struggle to build passionate relationships with their audience. That's because the practice of branding has devolved into clever wordplay, spinning, distraction, and pricey deliverables. Companies who buy into the old way miss out on the most crucial element for their success - a relationship based on shared value. Today, great brands must do more than just spin, wow, or satisfy their customers, they must create passionate ones. The Lean Brand teaches you how to build that relationship in a validated, iterative way. A passionate audience has connected to something more than just a product with a specific feature set, or a clever ad campaign. They've engaged with who an organization is at its core and participates in the journey toward shared value. As the first book to apply lean principles to brand development to teach you how to develop meaningful relationships with your audience based on a shared journey of value creation. The Lean Brand will teach you: - The new definition of brand - Why relationships form between organizations and people - How to build passion with your customers using The Lean Brand Framework - How to use Viability Experiments to test and iterate your brand quickly to find Product-Market-Brand fit - How to apply these principles effectively using a set of tools called The Lean Brand Stack which includes the Persona Grid, the MVB Canvas, the Experiment Map and the Value Stream Matrix - How successful brands like Buffer and SoulPancake have used lean branding to build a strong customer base

Genres: Business, Startup

338 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Jeremiah Gardner is an author, speaker, lean brand practitioner, and bulldog lover. He helps startups, entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 organizations reframe the way they think about brand innovation, culture, and leadership. He is the author of The Lean Brand, the first book to apply lean principles to branding, is a sought after speaker, and has been featured in several media outlets including Lifehacker.com, The Guardian, Branding Magazine, and SayDaily. Reach him on Twitter @JeremiahGardner or http://jeremiahgardner.com.

Reviews

[Sam Hysell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought this book gave an incredibly practical and impactful framework for building a brand which is so often overlooked when creating a new product. Biggest high level take way was that brand largely breaks down into two parts - the functional value it provides (rational) and the emotional value it provides (irrational) - you should be focused on testing and iterating upon both the same way you do you're actual product.

[David Yarde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting but lengthy read that definitely does the concept of Branding justice.