The Onliness of Strong Brands

Marty Neumeier, author of Zag, talks about good vs. different, and zagging when others zig to make your brand stand out

by Jessie Scanlon

"Our brand is the only _____ that ______." Every company, in building a successful brand, should develop such an "onliness" statement, explains Marty Neumeier in his new book, Zag. If a company can't say briefly what makes its brand different from the competition, he advises, go back to the drawing board.

So, who is Marty Neumeier? He's the founder and president of Neutron, a San Francisco-based brand consultancy. Better yet, he is the only design and brand expert who writes big-idea books filled with practical how-to advice designed to be read on a brief plane ride. (Actually, he would probably say that this onliness statement is too long.)

In his book The Brand Gap, published in 2003, Neumeier addresses the wide gulf between business strategy and customer experience. Customers don't care about strategy, he argues, they care only about what your product, service, or company means in the context of their lives.

And ultimately, "your brand isn't what you say it is—it's what they say it is" based on that experience. In fewer than 200 pages, Neumeier makes his case and proposes a complete system of brand-building based on the interaction of five disciplines: differentiation, collaboration, innovation, validation, and cultivation.

Zag—a reference to the contrarian strategy of brand differentiation that is often attributed to John Hegarty, co-founder of ad firm BBH—takes a similar approach. It is part manifesto, part practical handbook, and you can read it between LaGuardia and Logan. In a series of e-mail exchanges, BusinessWeek.com editor Jessie Scanlon discussed trends, the challenge of the cluttered marketplace, and the key to zagging with Neumeier. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.

With Zag, you delve into one piece of the unified theory of brand you laid out in The Brand Gap—differentiation, or as you call it "radical differentiation." What do you mean by that?

Plain-old differentiation is beginning to fail in the face of increasing market clutter. Customers have so many choices today that they're beginning to shut down. Unless a brand, which I define as a customer's gut feeling about a product, service, or company, truly stands out from the clutter, it's doomed to incremental, evaporating profits as customers gravitate to the next, more meaningful brand. To build a real profit-making engine you need to start with radical differentiation. In other words, when everybody zigs, zag.

That's easier said than done. One of the most thought-provoking elements in the book is a Good Versus Different graph, in which you plot products into four quadrants based on their performance along the two axes of good (high quality, workmanship, aesthetics, etc.) and different (surprising, fresh, offbeat, etc.). The surprise is that products in the Not Good and Not Different quadrant, obviously a bad place to be, tend to test well in market research, while products in the best quadrant of Good and Different tend to test poorly. That leaves companies in a bit of a quandary.

It really does. How can a company bet on a winner, when the winner looks like a loser? Yet most of the great value-creating business ideas were initially rejected because the internal and external feedback was mixed or negative. Think of Post-It Notes—it took 3M (MMM) 11 years to imagine the product's potential. Or Herman Miller's Aeron chair, which customers said was the weirdest thing they'd ever sat in and would probably never buy. Or Cirque du Soleil, which people said would be boring without animals.

If you apply straight-line metrics to ideas like these, you get a resounding "no-go". The trick is to evaluate ideas the way a designer would, by matching the customer reactions to previous success patterns.