#1 Globe and Mail Bestseller 2016 Small Business Book Awards — Nominated, Marketing category Sticky Brands exist in almost every industry. Companies like Apple, Nike, and Starbucks have made themselves as recognizable as they are successful. But large companies are not the only ones who can stand out. Any business willing to challenge industry norms and find innovative ways to serve its customers can grow into a Sticky Brand. Based on a decade of research into what makes companies successful, Sticky Branding is your branding playbook. It provides ideas, stories, and exercises that will make your company stand out, attract customers, and grow into an incredible brand. Sticky Branding’s 12.5 guiding principles are drawn from hundreds of interviews with CEOs and business owners who have excelled within their industries.

Miller delivers a proven, step-by-step brand naming process to create an unforgettable name. The book explains to readers what to do every step of the way--right down to exercises to generate lots of naming ideas to techniques on how to test which names resonate the most.most.

Every year, 6 million companies and more than 100,000 products are launched. They all need an awesome name, but many (such as Xobni, Svbtle, and Doostang) look like the results of a drunken Scrabble game. In this entertaining and engaging book, ace naming consultant Alexandra Watkins explains how anyone—even noncreative types—can create memorable and buzz-worthy brand names. No degree in linguistics required. The heart of the book is Watkins's proven SMILE and SCRATCH Test—two acronyms for what makes or breaks a name. She also provides up-to-date advice, like how to make sure that Siri spells your name correctly and how to nab an available domain name. And you'll see dozens of examples—the good, the bad, and the “so bad she gave them an award.” Alexandra Watkins is not afraid to name names.

For every banker who wants off of the commodity hamster wheel, this first-of-its-kind book helps bankers create super-sticky, value-based relationships and a future-proof financial brand.

Coca-Cola. Harley-Davidson. Nike. Budweiser. Valued by customers more for what they symbolize than for what they do, products like these are more than brands--they are cultural icons. How do managers create brands that resonate so powerfully with consumers? Based on extensive historical analyses of some of America's most successful iconic brands, including ESPN, Mountain Dew, Volkswagen, Budweiser, and Harley-Davidson, this book presents the first systematic model to explain how brands become icons. Douglas B. Holt shows how iconic brands create "identity myths" that, through powerful symbolism, soothe collective anxieties resulting from acute social change. Holt warns that icons can't be built through conventional branding strategies, which focus on benefits, brand personalities, and emotional relationships. Instead, he calls for a deeper cultural perspective on traditional marketing themes like targeting, positioning, brand equity, and brand loyalty--and outlines a distinctive set of "cultural branding" principles that will radically alter how companies approach everything from marketing strategy to market research to hiring and training managers. Until now, Holt shows, even the most successful iconic brands have emerged more by intuition and serendipity than by design. With How Brands Become Icons, managers can leverage the principles behind some of the most successful brands of the last half-century to build their own iconic brands. Douglas B. Holt is associate professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School.

For too long marketers have been asking the wrong question. If consumers make decisions unconsciously, why do we persist in asking them directly through traditional marketing research why they do what they do? They simply can't tell us because they don't really know. Before marketers develop strategies, they need to recognize that consumers have strategies too . . .human strategies, not consumer strategies. We need to go beyond asking why, and begin to ask how,behavior change occurs. Here, author DouglasVan Praet takes the most brilliant and revolutionary concepts from cognitive science and applies them to how we market, advertise, and consume in the modern digital age. Van Praet simplifies the most complex object in the known universe - the human brain - into seven codified actionable steps to behavior change. These steps are illustrated using real world examples from advertising, marketing, media and business to consciously unravel what brilliant marketers and ad practitioners have long done intuitively, deconstructing the real story behind some of the greatest marketing and business successes in recent history, such as Nike's "Just Do It" campaign; "Got Milk?"; Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" ;and the infamous Volkswagen "Punch Buggy" launch as well as their beloved "The Force" (Mini Darth Vader) Super Bowl commercial.

Book of Branding is an essential addition to the start-up toolkit, designed for entrepreneurs, founders, visual designers, brand creators and anyone seeking to decode the complicated world of brand identity. The conversational, jargon free, tone of the book helps the reader to understand essential elements of the brand identity process. Offering first hand experience, insights and tips throughout, the book uses real life case studies to show how great collaborative work can be achieved. Book of Branding is a creative guide for new businesses, start-ups and individuals, which puts visual identity at the heart of brand strategy.