Product Description

This innovative approach -- blending practicality and creativity -- is now in full-color!

From translating the vision of a CEO and conducting research, through designing a sustainable identity program and building online branding tools, Designing Brand Identity helps companies create stronger brands by offering real substance. With an easy-to-follow style, step-by-step considerations, and a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity, the book offers the tools you need, whether a brand manager, marketer, or designer, when creating or managing a brand. This edition includes a wealth of full-color examples and updated case studies for world-class brands such as BP, Unilever, Citi, Tazo Tea, and Mini Cooper.

Alina Wheeler (Philadelphia, PA) applies her strategic imagination to help build brands, create new identities, and design brand-identity programs for Fortune 100 companies, entrepreneurial ventures, foundations, and cities.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99381 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
"...the new edition of this well-regarded book is a joy...an inspiring and powerful toolkit" (The Marketer, May 2006)

From the Back Cover
Praise for Designing Brand Identity

This is the new bible for creating the look and feel of a brand. Step by step, touchpoint by touchpoint, Wheeler shows how to turn brand strategy into a perfect customer experience.
—Marty Neumeier, author, The Brand Gap

Alina Wheeler provides a practical structure for the brand-building process, a remarkable achievement in a discipline that is notorious for being out of touch with reality.
—Al Ries, coauthor, The Origin of Brands

Wheeler has succeeded in publishing a compendium that will prove to be a valued reference book for all members of the branding team.
—Communications Arts, May/June 2004

About the Author
Alina Wheeler applies a dynamic process to help enterprises express their brands. Her clients include entrepreneurial companies and foundations whose leaders embrace the future. Wheeler collaborates with strategists, designers, and managers, seizing every opportunity to build brands and provide compelling customer experiences.
Wheeler speaks frequently to management and creative teams in companies, as well as to business and design students at universities. She introduces branding fundamentals, identifies brand trends, and connects their relationship to innovation and business.

Customer Reviews

It's about identity, but not about the brand process
This *is* a great book when it comes to showing how to put together a coherent, soup-to-nuts identity program. But the title of the book is misleading - there's very little in this book about actually creating, building or maintaining strong brands per se. This wilfully confuses the logo for the company behind the logo. As Paul Rand once said of his logo for the ABC television network, it wasn't a matter of whether his logo lived up to the network, but whether the network lived up to the logo! The brand process involves a lot of non-graphical thought regarding the spirit or essence of what that organization is all about. "Is that an IBM thing to do?" The brand identity is, at best, only the surface expression: the brand is the idea of the company in its customers' minds. In that sense, creating and maintaining a strong brand is really about having clear direction, consistent policies and actions, and understanding that markets are conversations, not about whether the carpet matches the business cards and the Web site.

The title of this book might mislead you
When I put my hands on this book, I thought I would be adding one more point of view to my knowledge about brand identity, but this didn't quite happen.

This book isn't really about designing brand identity itself, but mostly about materializing brand identity into the visual identity of a company, limiting its whole concept. Furthermore, it is known that mere visual identity doesn't make a brand any stronger, as the title suggests.

Anybody with some previous brand identity knowledge in the marketing sense might get a little frustrated, had this person expected deep explanations about the creation of a brand identity plan (for that I would recommend Aaker's work).

On the other hand, if you are a designer willing to understand how to develop a visual identity linked to a brand identity, this book could be very useful.

almost a 5
This could have been a 5star rating. The thing that held me from making it one is the print quality of the book. Honestly, I've got books half this price that are on better paper, and in full color. A book that is printed on two different types of (cheap) paper, and offers only 4 color pages just doesn't impress me. Not at this price. I felt dissapointed for sure.

Now, about the title: it could have been a better one. While it states "designing", it is more about "constructing" and "rationalizing". If you want a book that shows you how to design a logo/trademark, this is not it. The value of this book is that it will explain and deconstruct every single aspect about the total brand identity process, and how it can then apply. The later has visual examples - though as mentioned in extremely low quality bw print. But again: these visuals serve only to underscore the process.

If you need a book that will explain every process, theory and element of brand identity, click ad to shopping cart. It is an easy read, short and to the point paragraphs for us time (or attention spam) challenged people. It is a must-have and must-know for anyone in advertising, marketing or design, regardless of being creative.

If you want a book that depicts and demonstrates how a trademark has been thought of, worked out, presented, fine tuned, etc., this is not it.