Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team [Hardcover]

Alina Wheeler (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0470401427 | ISBN-13: 978-0470401422 | Publication Date: August 31, 2009 | Edition: 3

Praise for previous editions of Designing Brand Identity:

An inspiring and powerful toolkit.

The Marketer

Alina Wheeler provides a practical structure for the brand building process.

Al Ries, coauthor, Positioning

Wheeler's book offers a cogent description of how strategy and design meet in the real world among world-class companies.

Marty Neumeier, author, The Brand Gap

A valued reference book for all members of the branding team.

Communication Arts

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Product Description

Who are you?

Who needs to know?

Why should they care?

How will they find out?

In a densely crowded marketplace, corporations, organizations, and even individuals look for ways to differentiate themselves. That is the job of branding.

Whether your goal is to express a new brand or to revitalize an existing one, here is a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity. From research and analysis through brand strategy, design development through application design, and identity standards through launch and governance, Designing Brand Identity is an essential reference for the entire process.

Enriched by new case studies showcasing successful world-class brands from Herman Miller and General Electric to the Obama '08 election campaign, this Third Edition offers new insights into emerging trends such as sustainability and social networks.

Alina Wheeler applies her strategic imagination and process management skills to revitalize brands for Fortune 100 companies, entrepreneurial ventures, and nonprofits.

Twelve Traits of the Best Brand Identity Firms

The choice for any client can be daunting. More than ever, there is a panoply of highly capable firms that specialize in brand identity. Which ones should companies trust to revitalize their brand? Whether the firms are global brand consultancies, multidisciplinary design offices, design boutiques, or specialists in areas such as packaging or interactivity, these core competencies hold true.

1. Strategic imagination. An ability to understand and align business goals with creative strategy and expression is critical.

2. Process focus. A disciplined process is used to foster collaboration, build trust, and ensure responsible decision-making and results.

3. Design excellence. Reducing a complex, meaningful idea to its visual essence requires skill, patience, and unending discipline, whether the endpoint is a symbol, a look and feel, or an integrated brand identity system.

4. Irrefutable logic. Creating a new system or brand architecture requires an ability to communicate a compelling case for change to any decision-maker, from the CEO to the director of marketing to a division head.

5. Alchemy. An ability to synthesize vast amounts of information and reduce it to a big idea. Also, an ability to cut through the clutter and see the “gold” in a marketing audit.

6. Empathy and insight. An ability to be collaborative and understand the perspectives of all stakeholders, to suspend judgment and transcend politics.

7. Flexibility and humor. An ability to keep an eye on the big picture despite constraints and challenges. A sense of humor always helps.

8. Mindfulness and curiosity. An awareness of what is going on in the wider world and insight into best practices and the branding landscape.

9. Tenacity. Boundless energy and the perseverance of a marathon runner are required to develop and refine key messages, new names, taglines, and branding guidelines.

10. Organization. Phase by phase, email by email, presentation by presentation, file by file, tracking and documentation are key.

11. Focus. First and foremost, the process must stay focused on the customer and their experience.

12. Passion. Passion fuels excellence and inspires brand engagement.

Review

"Returning with a third edition is the branding bible that is widely regarded as the absolute best, most comprehensive, most successful, and most effective book to use as a reference when creating a brand and brand identity, Designing Brand Identity. Very thorough and to the point, Wheeler's guide takes one through the process of developing, implementing, disseminating, and maintaining a brand identity for a company, organization, or group and give them an edge in the marketplace." (San Francisco Book Review, January 25, 2010)

"We will be reading the book together as a company, and you should stoop and buy one now." (matchstic.com, August 25, 2009)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 3 edition (August 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470401427
• ISBN-13: 978-0470401422
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #9 in Books > Arts & Photography > Design & Decorative Arts > Graphic Design
  • #15 in Books > Business & Investing > Marketing & Sales > Marketing

More About the Author

Alina Wheeler engages enterprises in a dynamic process to build their brands and embrace best practices. Wheeler inspires the whole branding team to seize every opportunity to design compelling customer experiences at every touchpoint. Designing Brand Identity, now in its third edition, is the first book to deconstruct the branding process into a universal, five-phase methodology. Her signature mantra is "Who are you? Who needs to know? Why should they care? How will they find out?" Her new book Brand Atlas is a collaboration with Joel Katz, world renown information designer. Brand Atlas reinvents the paradigm of a business book, and illuminates fifty-five brand topics.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not recommended for working professionals, April 28, 2011

By 

AK (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team (Hardcover)

As a young design professional with 5 years of experience, I came to this book with an existing knowledge-base about branding and a desire to streamline my design process.

Part 1, Brand Basics, will be familiar to anyone who works in branding. Words like "positioning" are defined, accompanied by brief anecdotes about known brands. It lived up to my expectations -- a refresher with some nice quotes.

Part 2, Process, sets out to elaborate the actual steps toward making a brand. This is where the book unraveled for me. I had hoped for in-depth examples from the author's (or her contributers') experience and hard facts. If they needed to update a logo, who sat down with who? Where, when, and how often? What was the first thing they decided to do? What was the outcome of that decision? What did the first sketches look like?

Instead, I found descriptions far too vague and generalized to be of much help. For example, the page on Naming first lists a lot of common sense: dictionaries and thesauruses are good resources, and paring down large lists takes patience. Next, the actual process is stated, with steps such as "develop decision-making process" and "create numerous names." These leave me wanting so much more -- the former seems deliberately irritating (my process is making a process?) while the latter is simplistically obvious. While I understand that there's no magic process or correct number of names that works in every situation, detailed examples from real branding decisions certainly would have illuminated the concepts better.

Part 3, Best Practices, would more accurately be named More Anecdotes. Each spread tells a bit about the branding efforts of brands such as Hot Wheels or FedEx. These serve as interesting and inspiring stories, but there is not enough depth or detail to make them practical examples.

To sum up: because this is not a particularly dense read and the information is accurate, I would recommend it to a student. As a professional, I would prefer more substance. While the author labels it "a quick reference guide", I found it to be a very quick overview.

43 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The bible of brand design, September 30, 2009

By 

Marty Neumeier "author of The Designful Company" (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team (Hardcover)

Writers have The Elements of Style. Managers have The Effective Executive. Chairpeople have Robert's Rules of Order. And now brand-builders have Designing Brand Identity. If you have (or would like to have) responsibility for managing, measuring, critiquing, or designing a brand, you've found your bible. And if you already own the first or second edition, you'll want to upgrade to the third. What I find most remarkable is that, aside from the thorough and relevant content, the design of the book is everything you'd expect from a top brand designer--and so seldom get. A classic.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shows how all the pieces fit together, September 9, 2009

By 

Carol Novello (Los Altos, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team (Hardcover)

This book saved me hours of time. It lays out a step-by-step process that would've taken a lot more time figuring out on my own if I didn't have this as a resource. If you're trying to convince people in your company to put more resources into branding, this book gives you what you need to make a strong case.

I found the format easy to use because it integrates instruction, example, text, pictures, and charts. Case study section is more text intensive than the others but still manageable. Has the stuff you need to get the job done -- starts with the big picture and goes down through the executional details.