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Both Matt Haig and Marty Neumeier have written brand books that promise to give us the inside track on how the most powerful brands 'thrive and survive' in today's dynamic marketplace. Haig's work encompasses more than 300 pages of text, while Neumeier's is a brief 178 pages. The irony here is that Neumeier packs far more credibility and brand wisdom into far fewer pages.
Haig's book, Brand Royalty , is a compilation of vignettes of what Haig views as the top 100 brands in the market. The 100 brands are organized into categories that define the corresponding chapters: Innovation Brands, Design Brands, Pioneer Brands, Status Brands, People Brands, etc. While this organization of chapters makes the book easy to read, it also reinforces a silo mentality by forcing brands into strict categories. This type of chapter segmentation also disregards the fact that a lot of brands defy simple categorization. A brand like Target, for example, might be considered by some as both innovative and design-focused. One recommendation for any future editions of the book would be to use the most important or substantive chapter titles as variables - and then rate each of the brands on these variable scales.
Most of the individual chapters are relatively equal in length, but some chapters are noticeably longer. Whether this is because Haig views the brand as more successful - or merely more noteworthy - is unclear. Inside each chapter, Haig provides a list of what he refers to as 'Secrets of Success,' where he distills his previous narrative summary into anywhere from two to four or five insightful sentences about what makes the brand superior. These summary sentences are a perfect condensed version of the book for those who wish to understand the broad strokes rather than read all of the detailed chapters.
Within each of these narrative summaries, Haig provides some interesting factoids about various brands: for example, the Red Cross has allowed Johnson & Johnson - a 'Responsibility Brand'- to use its very recognizable and highly protected trade mark because it views Johnson & Johnson in...