An inspiring and powerful toolkit.

The Marketer

Alina Wheeler provides a practical structure for the brand building process.

Al Ries, coauthor, Positioning

Wheeler's book offers a cogent description of how strategy and design meet in the real world among world-class companies.

Marty Neumeier, author, The Brand Gap

A valued reference book for all members of the branding team.

Communication Arts

Product Description

Who are you?

Who needs to know?

Why should they care?

How will they find out?

In a densely crowded marketplace, corporations, organizations, and even individuals look for ways to differentiate themselves. That is the job of branding.

Whether your goal is to express a new brand or to revitalize an existing one, here is a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity. From research and analysis through brand strategy, design development through application design, and identity standards through launch and governance, Designing Brand Identity is an essential reference for the entire process.

Enriched by new case studies showcasing successful world-class brands from Herman Miller and General Electric to the Obama '08 election campaign, this Third Edition offers new insights into emerging trends such as sustainability and social networks.

Alina Wheeler applies her strategic imagination and process management skills to revitalize brands for Fortune 100 companies, entrepreneurial ventures, and nonprofits.

Twelve Traits of the Best Brand Identity Firms

1. Strategic imagination.An ability to understand and align business goals with creative strategy and expression is critical.

2. Process focus.A disciplined process is used to foster collaboration, build trust, and ensure responsible decision-making and results.

3. Design excellence.Reducing a complex, meaningful idea to its visual essence requires skill, patience, and unending discipline, whether the endpoint is a symbol, a look and feel, or an integrated brand identity system.

4. Irrefutable logic.Creating a new system or brand architecture requires an ability to communicate a compelling case for change to any decision-maker, from the CEO to the director of marketing to a division head.

5. Alchemy.An ability to synthesize vast amounts of information and reduce it to a big idea. Also, an ability to cut through the clutter and see the“gold” in a marketing audit.

6. Empathy and insight.An ability to be collaborative and understand the perspectives of all stakeholders, to suspend judgment and transcend politics.

7. Flexibility and humor.An ability to keep an eye on the big picture despite constraints and challenges. A sense of humor always helps.

8. Mindfulness and curiosity.An awareness of what is going on in the wider world and insight into best practices and the branding landscape.

9. Tenacity.Boundless energy and the perseverance of a marathon runner are required to develop and refine key messages, new names, taglines, and branding guidelines.

10. Organization.Phase by phase, email by email, presentation by presentation, file by file, tracking and documentation are key.

11. Focus.First and foremost, the process must stay focused on the customer and their experience.

12. Passion.Passion fuels excellence and inspires brand engagement.

Based on the idea that you can't cover (and don't want to) everything in a survey course, H.W. Brands and a team of award-winning historians present the story of American history in a refreshing new way.

American Stories: A History of the United States concentrates on the topics most commonly taught in an American history survey course, with a focus on the major themes and the connections between them. A unique pedagogical program developed and implemented by instructional designers provides a consistent structure for students as the story of American history unfolds.  

Insights and provocations from world-renowned brand consultants, thought leaders, designers, and strategists.

The world runs on the U.S. dollar. From Washington to Beijing, governments, businesses, and individuals rely on the dollar to conduct commerce and invest profitably and safely--even after the global financial meltdown in 2008 revealed the potentially catastrophic cost of the dollar's hegemony. But how did the greenback achieve this planetary dominance a mere century and a half after President Lincoln issued the first currency backed only by the credit--and credibility--of the federal government?

InGreenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign.

Why do we always grab for the-second-newspaper-from-the-top of a stack of newspapers? When we talk on our cell phones why do most of us walk in a slowly decreasing circle? Do you know that "Competitive Altruism"--e.g. keeping up with that neighbor of ours who also owns a spiffy Prius--usually lies behind our decision to buy a bagful of organic apples and shut off the sprinkler?

The strange ways in which we consumers walk, talk, and whip out our wallets underscoreBrandWashed, Martin Lindstrom's fascinating, entertaining, occasionally shocking expose of the drivers advertisers and marketers use to make us buy. I consider Martin a kindred spirit. He enjoys nothing more than uncovering the hidden incentives behind all kinds of human behavior and social phenomena, and the differences between how we say we act versus how we actually act (in econo-speak, we call this declared preferences versus revealed preferences).

Marketing and advertising are smarty-pants industries. They know a whole lot about us. A global marketing guru for such companies as Pepsico, Disney, McDonald's, and Microsoft, Martin takes us backstage to expose the ruses and tricks companies and marketers use to get us to spend mad money. Such as nostalgia, fear, peer pressure, celebrity, and the inclusion of magical ingredients and elixirs that promise to banish all human worry and make you look sixteen forever--well, at least until you die. Last but never least, there's sex. I promise you'll get a kick out of reading who the real audience for pretty-boy teen singers is, how men really respond to male-underwear ads, and the drunken research Unilever commissioned before the company rolled out its randy TV ads for Axe deodorant and body spray.

I've read the first chapter of dozens of business books over the last five years; rarely do I make it any further. Indeed, I've only read two business books from cover to cover in that time period:BuyologyandBrandWashed. It is no coincidence that Martin Lindstrom is the author of both of those books. Simply put, Martin Lindstrom is the most innovative and creative marketer on the planet.BrandWashedis smart, thought-provoking, and laugh out loud funny. It's even better thanBuyology, if that is possible.--Steven D. Levitt