About the Book
Great brands do more than just satisfy customers, they create passionate ones.
Thousands of startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprise corporations struggle to build passionate relationships with their audience. That's because the practice of branding has devolved into clever wordplay, spinning, distraction, and pricey deliverables. Companies who buy into the old way miss out on the most crucial element for their success – a relationship based on shared value.
Today, great brands must do more than just spin, wow, or satisfy their customers, they must create passionate ones. The Lean Brand teaches you how to build that relationship in a validated, iterative way. A passionate audience has connected to something more than just a product with a specific feature set, or a clever ad campaign. They've engaged with who an organization is at its core and participates in the journey toward shared value.
As the first book to apply lean principles to brand development to teach you how to develop meaningful relationships with your audience based on a shared journey of value creation, The Lean Brand will teach you:
What You'll Learn
The new definition of brand
How to build passion with your customers using the Lean Brand Framework
How to use Viability Experiments with a Minimum Viable Brand to test and iterate your brand quickly to find Product-Market-Brand fit
How to apply these principles effectively using a set of tools called The Lean Brand Stack which includes the Persona Grid, the MVB Canvas, the Experiment Map and the Value Stream Matrix
How successful startups like Buffer and SoulPancake have used lean branding to build a strong customer base
The Framework
The Lean Brand Framework
The Lean Brand framework is about discovery. Through a process of solidifying your assumptions into hypotheses, you will learn to experiment to find validated learning in a “live” environment.
Lean branding uses an iterative and validated approach to the development of the relationship between an organization and an audience. The framework will introduce you to new concepts like the Emotional-Value Hypothesis, a Minimum Viable Brand and Product-Market-Brand Fit. The Lean Brand framework combines both theory and tools to provide an immediately useful framework for brand innovation and growth.
Phase 1
Define
Discover your organization's core purpose, vision, mission, and values. Define the emotional-value hypothesis that will guide your brand.
Phase 2
Validate
Create a Minimum Viable Brand to test your assumptions. Run viability experiments to validate or invalidate your emotional-value hypothesis.
Phase 3
Build
Once validated, build out your brand identity, language, and experience. Iterate based on ongoing feedback and learning.
Phase 4
Grow
Scale your validated brand through systematic growth. Maintain the relationship while expanding your audience reach.
Why Write a Book?
The Lean Brand was written to move our thinking, understanding, and practice of brand development forward. In short, The Lean Brand is about brand innovation. The intention is to help innovative startups, enterprises, and entrepreneurs fully develop emotional-value in their brand development efforts because truly great brands aren’t strategically imagined ahead of time, they’re discovered through experimentation, iteration, and validation on-the-go.
Who Is It For?
The Lean Brand joins and deepens the Lean Startup movement to contribute a framework for startups to integrate your brand development into the activities and ideas you're already employing as a lean startup. Whereas The Lean Startup and The Lean Entrepreneur provide techniques to create innovative products, The Lean Brand focuses on developing innovative relationships. When combined, the ideas and practices expressed in The Lean Startup, The Lean Entrepreneur, and The Lean Brand provide a dynamic platform for innovation and creation in our new marketplace.
About the Author
What People Are Saying
"Gardner grabs hold of brand and gives it a good yank, redefining it as the relationship between an organization and its audience. If you appreciate the principles of lean management, read this provocative book."
Marty Neumeier
Author of The Brand Gap, Director of Transformation, Liquid Agency
"The problem with most approaches to branding is that they get in their own way. They've managed to make the work of managing and building brands more opaque, more complicated, and less accessible. The Lean Brand takes the opposite approach: a manageable and understandable set of concepts, tools, and methodologies to make informed brand decisions."
Randy Hunt
Creative Director, Etsy
"Branding is the last bastion of old school, unaccountable marketing practices. But no more. The Lean Brand brings branding into our new world of value-creation, meaningful relationships with customers, and data-informed marketing decisions."
Brant Cooper
Author of The Lean Entrepreneur