Build a Brand to Change your World

This book is a step-by-step how-to guide for the entire brand-building process – to create a powerful brand from scratch or to rethink your existing branding strategy. Based on the Brand-Building Canvas and a system of related brand-building templates, it gives an overview of all useful branding tools and concepts. It takes you on a ride from brand vision to mission, from brand spirit and philosophy, brand ethics and values to brand personality and brand lifestyle. You will learn how all the brand identity elements are related and how to apply them to your brand – with the help of best-practice examples, case studies, hands-on how-to guides, checklists, and overviews of success factors and the major strategic options that you have at each stage. Above all, this is about creating BRAND MEANING. It helps you to find out what you want your brand to stand for. Consumers are increasingly judging brands by what they believe in, stand for, and do in the world – and many entrepreneurs also want to work on something they believe in. So we will go through all the options that you have to underpin your brand with meaning. This can be a compelling higher purpose, values and good intentions, a specific region-of-origin, and an affiliation with a certain art movement, philosophy, or subculture. In this way, you will learn to develop a specific type of brand: A lifestyle brand, driven by a strong identity and a higher purpose, which is often an ethical and sustainable brand, an alternative and spiritual business, or even an activist brand. As this type of brand may contradict with business practices in the mass-market, we will concentrate on the high-end cultural and creative industry, which spans from the arts and craftmanship to high-tech – and also includes people businesses such as artisans, designers, and healing professionals. On your way through this book, you will learn step-by-step how to build a high-end brand with a higher purpose – to change the world for the better.