Bridging the Brand Gap

One of my most favorite authors to refer to is Marty Neumeier. I was introduced to his books during a Branding Systems class while I was in the Communication Design program at Texas State University. His books enlightened me on the collaboration and comparison of how marketers and designers approach a “brand”. It was enlightening to see how marketers and designers work parallel to each other towards the same goal in very similar steps, but sometimes do not think to collaborate with the other. It was after reading his book The Brand Gap that it really started to get me thinking about graduate school and how I could help bridge the gap between marketing strategy and design.

“ Whenever there’s a rift between strategy and creativity—between logic and magic—there’s a brand gap.”

Now if you’re in the business, marketing, or creative industry, I highly recommend you get yourself a copy of The Brand Gap because it’s a great read to always keep on hand and its full of very valuable information. I won’t go through his entire book because I don’t want to take away the experience of reading his book, but the one big promise of this entire book is understanding the importance of having marketing and design communicate to “bridge the gap”.

“It takes a village to build a brand”

There is so much that is involved in building a strong brand, and Neumeier addresses many points of how to successfully do that. The point that I think is crucial though is that because there is so much to building a successful brand, one person, one department, one company, one supporter is going to share a limited insight to the vast knowledge that your contributors could provide. People come from different backgrounds, interests, and areas of expertise and if you want to successfully build a brand that has a strong following, allow for them to be communication and collaboration between all those involved who can help build it up. There may be a marketing strategist who can provide insight on different avenues to share your brand, a copy writer who can provide an impactful tagline to represent your brand, a designer who could capture your brand’s story visually, and so many more positions within a company or agency that can share their knowledge and capabilities, but it’s important for these various areas of expertise to all work together to and communicate what they can bring to the table in order to create that “gut feeling” within their followers and supporters to create a brand.

“A brand is not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.”

– Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

There are obviously various conversation that this topic can spread out to, such as brainstorming methodologies, inspiring creativity, team dynamics, and more. Eventually I hope to write it about any of those topics, so consider this the introduction to the theme of my blog as I continue to share resources, knowledge and experiences that I’m continuing to learn about.