The following is an excerpt draft from my upcoming book called, The Lean Brand: How Entrepreneurs Discover, Iterate and Develop Emotional-Value in the Marketplace. The book is the follow-up to Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits NYT bestselling book, The Lean Entrepreneur. Your feedback is more than welcome. More at: http://theleanbrand.me Whether you know it or not, you have a brand. Every interaction you’ve...

I was asked recently to do a workshop at a local college on branding. I agreed with the intention of talking about branding as a meta-concept. Little did I know, that the talk was pre-titled as a part of a larger ongoing series…and the title of the talk I was booked to do was, “Creating Your Own Brand.” My initial reaction...

Your band is a living organism. Like all living things, your brand requires an ecosystem that enables it to grow and evolve. An ecosystem made up of the optimal food, soil, climate, minerals, air, etc. Absent the right conditions, your brand will become stagnate and die. Maybe slowly, maybe quickly; but stagnation will take the life out of your brand. These biotic...

Humans, for thousands of years, have brought mythic creatures to life in stories, songs, and art. From the brawny Sasquatch to the soaring Phoenix, the powerful dragon to the enchanting mermaid – these stories have become part of our shared human consciousness. What is it about these mythic creatures that thrills us, frightens us, and transfixes us? Their origin. Do you...

If the purpose of branding is to facilitate relationships that create emotional-value, then the way you go about developing your brand matters. No matter what you’ve been told, what you’ve read or even what you’ve seen; there is no magic methodology, no silver-bullet or thaumaturgic process that will produce your brand. A brand is an imperfect, living, breathing organism, and each...

Understanding value is imperative to creating a successful startup. If you fail to discover the value that you bring for real people, you’ll never get off the starting blocks. This is true whether you are B2B, B2C, B2B2C or any other combination of B and the number 2. This is true whether you offer a physical product, a fancy new app,...

Your brand is not your logo, your identity or your product. Your brand is a gut feeling about you that lives deep inside of each of your customers. Like all feelings, they are extremely complex. To meet the needs of your customers, you need a brand strategy to translate the complexities of your brand in an overtly simple, clear and highly...

Discovering your emotional-value is a fundamental ingredient to building a successful business. Your Brand, by very definition, is the pathway to discovering and building real emotional-value. Why? Because brands define the relationship between you and your customers. People create allegiances and loyalty to brands because they form sets of emotional expectations and preferences about brands. Brands don’t and can’t compete at a commodity level…although often...

Disruptive. The buzzword that seems to be influencing our brand strategies more than any other word. From boardrooms to coffee shops, it seems that this word has become an emphasis for how we relate to our audience. Somehow being disruptive has become desirable. Business models can be disruptive. Both new-market and low-end disruptions occur at an industry-facing level. But disruptive business models...

Just a bit of housekeeping news. I’ve been asked to be a regular contributor to an amazing industry publication called Branding Magazine. You can check them out here: http://www.brandingmagazine.com. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I had to contribute to the magazine. There is a lot of great coverage on design, industry innovation and even strategy. So I decided to write...