Brand Innovation
Manifesto by
John Grant
New Title published April 10th 2006
Buy
the book here, watch the films or read a review
Brand Innovation John Grant
2006 John wiley Click on the title and you can order
the book from Amazon.
- Click here to
read the review.
- What
you may be even more interested to do is to view see my interview
of John Grant. I've had to put it here rather than on Youtube because
the fiiles are too big. There
are 3 films to watch:
Launch
event at the Ministry of sound
- A
short clip from the launch event at the Ministry of Sound. With plaudits
from John from James Palumbo the founder and owner. Because John was
doing a lot of work at the time for the aforesaid MOS. And got offered
a seat on the board. Which has to be cool by any measure.
Interview
1 with John talking about the ideas behind the book - brand molecules
and the like
- This
is where John talks through the ideas in the book - how molecules form,
how you add to them - what makes a brand molecule stable
Interview
2 with John talking about the Brand tarot card pack
- If you
only buy the book you've only got half the story. There's a deck
of cards based on the table of elements which you can use to brainstorm new
brand ideas for a given market category. John cuts the deck
for us.
Review
of Brand Innovation Manifesto
John Grant’s
first book was also a manifesto (are you allowed to write more than
one manifesto I wonder?) Number one was about New Marketing.
This manifesto is about how brands evolve. It’s not about new
products per se. In his last book Altered Images John evolved an elaborate
typology to explain how brand ideas linked to big culture ideas. In
this book the structure of the idea molecule is much simplified. Brands
are now clusters of ideas rather like balloons. Brand consistency
goes out of the window – consistency is only for liars he says
memorably. What matters is which ideas are linked and how much energy
a brand has to keep the brand ‘molecule’ together. This
way of looking at branding is altogether more freewheeling. Successful
marketers add new ideas regularly to keep their brands interesting
and to keep the attention of the audience. The first section
of the book unpacks this theory of rolling narrative development. It
is obvious from the examples that John draws on that the biggest most
successful brands have the largest and most elaborate molecules. And
that there is real variety in the complexity of the ideas. What
is not so obvious is what it takes to make an idea stick and when an
idea needs reinforcing and when a new one is required. But this
first section of the book is a useful summary of where brand thinking
is going – less tied to artificial values arbitrarily associated
with the brand and more with how interesting are the juxtapositions
of the ideas which the marketers introduce.
The second
part of the book is basically a summary list of these ideas. John doesn’t
claim these are comprehensive. But it is clear from the structure that
these do represent a kind of system or table of elements of cultural ideas
which can be found in most markets. For each of the 35 ideas a casestudy
is provided for which it was central to the brand and one provided for
which the idea was secondary but still important. So there’s
no shortage of case study material. The final part of the book uses a case
study for Lynx to show how the book can be put to use. For me what really
made the difference was not the final part but the pack of cards called
the Brand Tarot pack which you can buy as an adjunct to the book which
contains the complete set of ideas. First you need to remove the ideas
which are already being used by competitors and only after that to brainstorm
how to use the ideas which remain with of course reference to the book
and the relevant case studies. Which makes the book immediately much
more usable than most. Clearly the cards can be used in a number of different
ways. As well as using them to find new territory, you can use them to
extend and reinvigorate existing strategies by looking at new combinations.
You can identify spoiler strategies for challenger brands. The cards really
make the difference to whether the book will be left on the shelf or be
in regular use. I believe there is a plan to put an online version
on John’s website www.brandtarot.com so
you can seek inspiration on the fly and pick your random card for the day!
Watch this space.. What I like about the book is this blend of the systematic
and the practical – yes there’s a useful briefing on brand
thinking. But the ability to map the core ideas in markets moves us away
from a sterile debate about how many brand values can dance on a pinhead
to the extent to which a brand is able to blend big cultural ideas together
to create engagement. A must buy although I would strongly recommend you
go for the cards as well.
Click here to
order your own copy of Brand Innovation.
Click here
to order your own copy of After Image.
Click here
to order your own copy of the New Marketing Manifesto.
Click
here to find out more
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