The Marty Gap

You may look at this book and ask yourself, why do we need another book on the subject brand? On my bookshelves alone, there are over twenty books on the topic of brand. So I questioned the need for yet another book on the topic - making it difficult to squeeze onto my bookshelves.

However, what if a designer wrote the book? This could lend an interesting slant on the topic. And that he was a successful writer and brand consultant. He had developed the branding for Netscape, as well as other work for companies like Adobe, Kodak and HP.

What if I told you the author of this yet-another-brand-book was previously the editor and publisher of Critique in the late nineties. Yes - that magazine which quickly became the most cherished of all graphic design magazines by all (US?) graphic designers. With it’s impeccable quality of production, outstanding spreads of design critique, and rich with thoughtful, insightful and meaningful content relevant to both senior and junior designers everywhere. The arrival of Critique brightened every season it arrived in, and I easily dismissed the fact that the magazine stopped coming in the middle of my subscription, thankful that I had received any in the first place.

So what if I told you that this book was to cover the space in between the business and the design world? And it would look to bridge that distance between strategy and creativity with clean, punchy and descriptive content. Even pictures too?

And what if I told you that other legendary brand academics such as David Aaaker (yes - that Aaker, who is responsible for filling up so much space on my bookshelves) and Clement Mok value this book, as somewhere between the only one you’ll need to read on the topic and being a pleasure to read?

Well you would surely consider this to be a winner, if it has all that going for it - and you’re basically wondering what I’m setting you up for here.

So what happens if the book doesn’t quite live up to all that? How disappointed would you be? Its not the 14.95 (11.50 UK) I spent on the book, but the gap between what I expected from Marty Neumeier and what I actually got.

I expected a book packed with concepts and insight from the former editor and publisher of Critique that would possibly distill some of the twenty-five books on my shelves, into neat and tidy concepts that both business executives and designers could swallow. With attention to mapping it back to the functions and activities in every day business life.

I felt that if anyone had the talent, Neumeier surely did, to be able to cut away the fat and confusing brand babble that so many other books get caught up in, and give us, as he suggests, the “whiteboard overview” of the topic.

Instead, I felt duped. It certainly was an overview, and in some cases the examples were interesting, but more than several times it was confusing and misleading. It felt like he was trying to cram in a whole day’s seminar into a thirty-minute presentation.

The book speeds through topics too briefly to do some of them justice. Sometimes pausing on a particular topic to labor a point excessively, like spending five pages on how to build a brand network, within his “new collaboratives’ discussion. But only two pages to discusses the design and layout of web sites, which I thought undermined his point. He confuses the reader by asking them to chose which web site looks easier to use showing a packed web portal page (Excite) and the simple Google web page. I felt he could have also asked which looked nicer, the inside of the Guggenheim or the inside of a Walmart? For his example - looking nicer or easier doesn’t have anything to do with how the organizations make money, which is an integral part of design or branding. Google’s business is fairly different to Excite’s, thus the need for Excite to have a packed - but yet configurable web page design and Google does not.

In another example of idiocy, no this really is, Neumeier suggests a way to test your logo’s effectiveness by swapping it out with another’s. Yeah - that’s right, take your company logo - lets say IBM and put that in Apple’s branding. Does it fit? No? Cool - then your logo clearly is good enough. But if you should try something like, the following and it is plausible that the new swap-over isn’t crap then you obviously still need to do some work on it. I sort of understand the thinking behind it, but since logos are rarely seen outside of the branding system or context of the organization or product attached to it, then I don’t see the real value of this exercise.

At another point in the book, Neumeier suggest that brands can be inconsistent (p133). Or at least he says, “Brands can afford to be inconsistent…” This threw me, because after spending several pages, in the beginning of the book, telling me what a brand was not, that it was in fact a ‘gut instinct’, I felt that any inconsistency would make me feel something was rotten about that brand. In fact, much like people, if someone is continuously inconsistent we begin to label him or her as dodgy, perhaps unreliable or even simply dishonest. I think that branding can afford to be inconsistent, but the brand and what it stands for has to stay simple, focused and clear. Should it change its path -that’s okay, but then it should do everything to ditch the past ensuring that there is no perceivable inconsistency with what it now aspires to be and what it once was.

Overall, the book is a lightweight collection of thinking we’ve heard or read somewhere else before. Perhaps we saw it first in Reis and Trout’s writing, or it really is common sense. And for a book on brand, attempting to demystify the fuzzy area between brand building exercises, it oddly never mentions the term value proposition. Which is perhaps, in itself, the single most commonly misunderstood property of a brand or business.

For some this book will be a welcome breeze of clear, punchy and sometimes witty writing that will inform and educate. It will be a welcome distraction from the monthly newsletters on energy CRM applications or circular engines for garage doors. But for the rest of us, it might be a bit too light, too misleading and in places not quite cut it as an adequate look into Neumeier’s deep understanding and wealth of experience in brand.

2005-03-23 + plink