Brand Now: How to Stand Out in a Crowded, Distracted World by Nick Westergaard
Nick Westergaard is a strategist, speaker, author, and educator. As Chief Brand Strategist at Brand Driven Digital, he helps build better brands and organizations of all sizes–from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.
Nick is also the author of Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing For Businesses Big And Small. He is a contributor to the Harvard Business review and host of the popular On Brand podcast. His thoughts have been featured in new sources such as US News & World Report, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Mashable, and more.
And interesting fact: he is a Trekker!
The Host’s Perspective:
I have a confession to make.
When someone talks about brands and brand building my eyes glaze over.
I tend to agree with Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian, who famously claims that “There’s no BS like brand BS.”
The reason my BS meter gets activated when someone purports to be a branding expert or guru is because the old, traditional, one-way rules of branding are now largely defunct, yet so many experts continue to espouse the same tired old approaches.
If they were physicians they’d probably still be recommending bloodletting to cure their patients.
In the past you might have heard a brand described as a covenant an organization had with their customers, or a promise. Or a mental construct of all associations, both conscious and subconscious, that a consumer has about your organization.
But in the internet era, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos aptly defines it this way, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
A lot has changed when it comes to branding. There was a time when organizations had a lot of control over what their brand stood for and what was said about it.
But with the rise of the internet, people can check the veracity of what a brand is claiming and they can talk back and tell others the truth.
In a sea of dated advice on how to build a brand, Nick Westergaard’s book is a much-needed lifeboat of reality for how to effectively build a brand in the 21st century.
And it couldn’t have come soon enough. That’s because, in a time when it’s never been more difficult to effectively brand your organization, the ability to do that is more important than ever.
The book breaks down a framework for building the brand into just 7 steps that will surprise you.
And it’s not a long, flowery fatuous book that anyone outside the marketing department would smirk at. It’s very much a how to and, for lack of a better term, “no-BS” approach to building a modern, profitable brand.
At a time when companies don’t know where to start building the foundation for becoming known, liked and trusted, this is a book that you could hand to a CEO or board of directors to help them understand not only the importance of building a great brand, but also what tired, traditional branding nonsense they should avoid.
Listen to the Interview:
Show Notes
The Excellence Dividend by Tom Peters
Douglas Burdett and Nick Westergaard at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston, Massachusetts
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