Brand Real: The Startup Entrepreneurs’ Guide to Effective Branding and Building Values-Based Organizations

No business, ever, can ignore branding. It’s your most revealing communication channel between your product/service and your customers. (Note: For the sake of brevity, "product" will mean "product/service" in the rest of this review.) It proposes what’s appealing to their tastes in such a powerful manner that the customer usually ends up buying your product!

You might think branding is easy, but that isn't true. It looks deceptively simple, but if you study branding you’ll find it a highly involved and complex subject that leverages all types of knowledge of human communication. Of course, the tangible channels (i.e., primarily sight & hearing) are used extensively, but what’s of more importance in branding are the vastly more powerful subliminal channels. Brand Real, by an expert, provides professional guidance that will help you accomplish the best branding for your product(s).

The author, Vasken Kalayjian, has over 30 years of experience in global branding. He is the founder and CEO of GK Tribe Global (Website: gkbrand.com), where he continues to practice branding to date.

Although the book’s title might suggest that it deals with the subject of branding alone, it goes much deeper by discussing topics like prerequisites of a business that must be in place before a brand can be successfully launched: your business' values, your commitment to practice them, your friends & foes, and so on. A brand is the shortest, most deeply penetrating message that represents your product to buyers. It may be a name, image, symbol, design, or a combination of these that uniquely establishes your product’s identity in the marketplace. It seeks to tell your customer, “Hello, I’m your dream-come-true, so-and-so product. You know me already because I’m one of your fairy-tale like wishes that reside somewhere deep inside you—but you can’t describe me, even if you tried! You’ve been searching for me for long, and a notion of me faintly passes through your mind from time to time. Now, I've come to life! I'm making a true-life appearance right before you... Don’t hesitate! Don’t doubt!! Buy me now!!!” If your product faces competition, it must also outdo the competition by convincing the customer to buy your product, not that of a competitor!

This book contains 27 chapters that impart rich, practical knowledge of state-of-the-art branding. Besides, there are exercises at the end of most chapters that push you to try your hand at what you've learned soon.

If your product is good, successful branding, in tandem with delivering on the promises you make through your brand, should cause your product to sell like hotcakes, for years to come.

The author writes fluently, and I didn't notice any errors in the book. It is an essential book for Startups. I also recommend it to those who work in the marketing, sales, and top management functions of businesses.