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RR 2007/273 The Brand Glossary Edited by Jeff Swystun Interbrand Group/Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke 2007 134 pp. ISBN 978 1 4039 9809 5 £25 $42.50
Keywords Brands, Dictionaries
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120710775390
Interbrand is an internationally respected branding and corporate identity consultancy founded in London in 1974. It also publishes a range of books and reports, to which The Brand Glossary is the latest addition. Jeffrey Swystun, the editor, is Global Director of Interbrand, and he was able to draw on the knowledge of over a thousand of his colleagues across the world. Yet the book retains a noticeable American bias. Swystun's aims are twofold: to contribute to the development of a shared language of branding, and to stimulate creativity.
The Brand Glossary is decorated with diagrams and pictograms, while quotations or "Brand Facts" appear as sound-bites on most pages (they add little to the reference value of the book). Some of the quotations (none of which are properly sourced) are thought-provoking, but others are cynical ("The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources", dubiously attributed to Albert Einstein), pretentious ("About two years ago I realized I was no longer a person but a brand" - Martha Stewart), cryptic ("A great brand is a story that's never completely told" - Scott Bedbury), and banal ("Companies that enjoy enduring success have core values and a core purpose that remain fixed while their business strategies and practices endlessly adapt to their changing world" - James Collins).
The glossary is organized alphabetically word-by-word,...