Better Branding, Better Benefits Marketing techniques, retailers, and distribution channels have changed dramatically since authors RICK CESARI and BARB WESTFIELD started in the business of brand building and direct response advertising twenty-five-plus years ago, and they will continue to change, but over their combined years of experience, Rick and Barb have found that five key strategies have remained constant: 1 Utilizing your "unique selling proposition," or USP; 2 Creating a name and market position for your product or business; 3 Under-promising and over-delivering; 4 Listening to your customers to develop world-class customer service and powerful testimonials that will sell for you 24/7, and 5 Direct branding selling--the best way to brand for most small businesses and startups. In this book, Rick and Barb will expand on these simple brand-building keys and show you how they built brands like GoPro, the George Foreman Grill, Sonicare, and others using these keys, and how you, too, can put them to use immediately in your business or new product launch.

BERNT ULLMANN, often referred to as "the man behind the brands", has been a trusted brand acceleration expert helping generate over 6 billion dollars in global sales so far in his career. With over thirty years experience as a corporate executive of major fashion brands, Ullmann's portfolio includes brand development and management including licensing and distribution, modernization, and global expansion for fashion moguls such as Daymond John, Eddie Lampert, and Tommy Hilfiger. He has also contributed to successful launches of platform expanding brands for celebrity clients like Jennifer Lopez, Adam Levine, Nicki Minaj, and many others. IN HIS DEBUT BOOK, The Billion Dollar Branding Blueprint, Ullmann shares his expertise in a systematic seven-step process to help entrepreneurs, no matter who, launch their brand successfully. This book is a step by step, easy to follow blueprint to achieve business acceleration and create lasting wealth.

Two advertising veterans explain the myths about branding—and how even the smallest businesses can benefit by defining themselves to their customers. Branding may be the single most misunderstood concept in marketing. It’s not only for big businesses with big bucks. It’s not about a logo, a color, a font, or a type of advertising. Branding is defining a company’s image in such a way that the customer is left with a single feeling about that business and what they do. Branding is about finding a business’s juicy center. Even small businesses on shoestring budgets and sole practitioners can learn the principles of good branding—an effort that encompasses not just messaging, but multiple day-to-day decisions that shape and build your customers’ perceptions and emotions. With numerous real-life examples and the expertise that comes only from experience, this book guides you to a new way of thinking about your business, and the kind of wisdom that no amount of money can buy.

The goal of this book is simple: to provide inspiration to others, so they can build a solid business and grow it into a billion-dollar company. Just as Richard Scrushy took this idea and turned it into a real, tangible product, his book shows you how to take your big idea and turn it into a real, profitable venture. It begins with a dream that you can only pursue by overcoming the fear of the unknown-obstacles, failures, humiliations-whatever form they may take, they can no longer stand in your way. Let Scrushy inspire and encourage you to take that first leap of faith. From there, it is a matter of making the math work, finding the money to get the ball rolling, building the management team, and taking your idea all the way to the top. Scrushy will show you what has worked for him in his two decades of experience, and he will help you avoid the same mistakes he made so that you can overcome obstacles on your climb to the top. With Scrushy as your guide, you're sure to enjoy and learn from his life experience while building your own billion-dollar company.

A leading business journalist takes us inside a business revolution: the upstart brands taking on the empires that long dominated the trillion-dollar consumer economy. Dollar Shave Club and its hilarious marketing. Casper mattresses popping out of a box. Third Love’s lingerie designed specifically for each woman’s body. Warby Parker mailing you five pairs of glasses to choose from. You’ve seen their ads. You (or someone you know) use their products. Each may appear, in isolation, as a rare David with the bravado to confront a Goliath, but taken together they represent a seismic shift in a business model that has lasted more than a century. As Lawrence Ingrassia--former business and economics editor and deputy managing editor at the New York Times--shows in this timely and eye-opening book, a growing number of digital entrepreneurs have found new and creative ways to crack the code on the bonanza of physical goods that move through our lives every day. They have discovered that manufacturing, marketing, logistics, and customer service have all been flattened—where there were once walls that protected big brands like Gillette, Sealy, Victoria’s Secret, or Lenscrafters, savvy and hungry innovators now can compete on price, value, quality, speed, convenience, and service. Billion Dollar Brand Club reveals the world of the entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and corporate behemoths battling over this terrain. And what fun it is. It’s a massive, high-stakes business saga animated by the personalities, flashes of insight, and stories behind the stuff we use every day.

Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

During the closing days of 1963, Harry E. Figgie Jr. left his job at Booz Allen Hamilton and patched together the financing to purchase a struggling $23 million sprinkler company. During the next 30 years, he grew the company into a consistently profitable, $1.3 billion diversified corporation through a strategic combination of internal and external growth, and a consistent focus on profit improvement. His Entrepreneurial Handbook is a step-by-step guide on how to replicate his success.