I’ve been enjoying Beyond the Brand by John Winsor. (Disclosure: John is a co-contributor of mine at BrandShift).
It’s a refreshingly different take on branding one that goes beyond the usual fixation with image making. Talking to Jennifer Rice on Skype, I realised that John doesn’t come from a conventional branding background and I think that makes his take more interesting. I’m on board with John when he talks about branding backwards – basically abandoning the idea of inventing a brand and stamping it on an unsuspecting audience, in favour of a more collaborative approach.
Like Evelyn (who writes about the book (here and here), I was excited to find a book on branding getting into the subject of David Bohm and Dialogue.
John puts forward a structured way for businesses to get to grip with smart, connected consumers that draws heavily on notions of storytelling and interaction. There is good material in here, and it will be fun to explore ideas of co-creativity with John at Brandshift. With his background in research, John’s good at diagrams and multi-step processes which a lot of clients will like – I’m pretty phobic to diagrams so this part didn’t grab me quite so much. Notwithstanding, I’d say this is way deeper and more interesting than 90% of the literature on how to do branding.
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