ZAG – MARTY NEUMEIER
The one-sentence summary:
When everybody else zigs, you should zag. Radical differentiation is the number one strategy of high performance brands.
WHAT THE BOOK SAYS
- In an age of me-too products and instant communications, keeping up with the competition is no longer a winning strategy. You have to out-position, out-manoeuvre, and out-design everyone else.
- There is a 17 step process for working all this out (see Brand Development Tool):
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- What’s your vision?
- What wave are you riding?
- Who shares the brandscape?
- What makes you the ‘only’?
- What should you add or subtract?
- Who loves you?
- Who’s the enemy?
- What do they call you?
- How do you explain yourself?
- How do you spread the word?
- How do people engage with you?
- What do they experience?
- How do you earn their loyalty?
- How do you extend your success?
- How do you protect your portfolio?
ELEMENTS OF THE BOOK I PARTICULARLY LIKE
- This is a short, inspirational book. You can follow the sequence and apply it to a brand immediately. Each step has a number of subsidiary questions.
- It tells you how to ‘find your zag’, then design it, and renew it.
- The main set up is that everything is speeding up, the real competition is clutter so don’t offer more, offer different.
- Companies today have no choice but to connect to the three insatiable demands of business: free, perfect and now.