What Great Brands Know: Unleash Your Right-Brain Genius to Stand Out and Make Customers Care - Softcover

Carlson, Tracy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0990003906 ISBN 13: 9780990003908

Publisher: Longstocking Press, 2014

Synopsis

How do you make customers care?

Today’s best practices in business—left-brain approaches like analysis, benchmarking, and quantitative modeling—may increase efficiency and boost profitability, but they typically result in lifeless tactics that leave customers cold. Truly great brands—the ones we’d mourn if they disappeared tomorrow—integrate human-centered, non-linear right-brain thinking. This is what sparks connection and creates raving fans.

For the first time, here’s a powerful framework that decodes the right-brain principles that make customers care. Through compelling examples distilled from iconic brands and emerging gems, Fortune 500 strategist Tracy Carlson illuminates six core principles that will help your brand come to life and fresh approaches you can immediately apply to both your business and marketing strategies.

Provocative and entertaining, this groundbreaking guide for business will resonate with innovators, brand experts and small business owners alike. What Great Brands Know will help you unleash your own right-brain genius for a whole-brain branding approach that works.

About this title

About the Author

Tracy Carlson is Founder & Principal of Right-Brain Brands. She is a seasoned marketing strategist, speaker and advisor who helps companies develop brands that people care about and that inspire loyalty. Tracy has led some of America’s best-known brands (Dove, Hellmann’s, Wisk) and consulted to many more (including General Mills, Rubbermaid, and Pepsi), and has extensive experience advising startups and small businesses as well.

Tracy’s non-traditional background combines equal parts Wharton MBA and unrepentant Yale humanities geek. This hybrid expertise, integrating human-centered right-brain thinking with left-brain analysis and metrics, forms the basis for her new book What Great Brands Know: Unleash Your Right-Brain Genius to Stand Out and Make Customers Care.

She has also written for The Washington Post, and marketing publications including Ad Age, BrandWeek, and AdMap. Tracy lives with her husband in the Boston area.

Review

“What an inspired book! These are great lessons for marketing, and for life. Tracy’s six principles are elegant in their simplicity, but are born from a lifetime of working with—and closely studying—great brands. This is a great book to share with everyone who touches your brand!”

—Sidney Falken, Chief Branding Officer, Hanes

“What Great Brands Know offers precisely what’s been missing from marketing for too long: a framework for integrating human, creative thinking with business strategy—an integration that’s required to create inspiring brands. Great brands are built with passion and a relentless focus on providing value to the customer—not through ‘branding’, which is often a superficial and hollow process. In this book, Carlson offers a warm, welcome and accessible path to creating compelling brands.”

—Eric Almquist, Partner, Bain & Company

“Today’s business owners need both/and thinking to successfully reach customers and stand out in the marketplace. What Great Brands Know will help you achieve the best of both. Drawn from compelling real-world examples, Carlson’s systematic and practical framework will satisfy your orderly left-brain while providing plenty of fun and accessible right-brain boosters to ignite your creative mind and transform your work.”

—Jennifer Lee, author of The Right-Brain Business Plan

“Carlson’s intelligent little book decodes how truly great brands create their magic—and lights a persuasive path for you and others to follow. You may not approach marketing in quite the same way again after reading What Great Brands Know—and that would be good for everyone, businesses and consumers alike.”

—Bill Gentner, President, Kao Consumer Products, Americas, Europe, Middle East & Africa

“This wonderful little book will have you cheering for an alternative approach to marketing that is at once accessible and inspiring. Written with humor and passion, What Great Brands Know will get you thinking about what’s wrong with business—and some innovative ways to fix it.”

—Diane Coutu, Director of Client Communications, Banyan Family Business Advisors and former Senior Editor, Harvard Business Review

“In the era of big data, Carlson offers a compelling reminder of the power of ideas, inspiration and instinct. A must read for marketers who want to reawaken their inner passions and build brands that matter.”

--Len Johnson, Executive Director, Marketing, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
“What Great Brands Know is a manifesto for right-brain branding that embodies the very virtues of creativity and humanity it extols. This is truly business thinking for the 21st century. Carlson’s book bristles with her trademark intelligence, insight, and wit, issuing a wake-up call for the world of marketing. I only hope executives are listening.”

—Pam Grossman, Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education, Stanford University

“This book outlines a framework for engaging whole-brain thinking that includes headings like ‘beauty’ and ‘harmony’ but don’t let these ‘soft’ topics fool you. Carlson makes a compelling case for engaging hearts as well as heads when we embark on a branding mission. She skillfully distills what we may intuitively sense about the brands we love into clear, logical explanations. The book itself demonstrates the principles of good branding. The reader can’t help but be engaged in the material, which is full of illustrative stories that are both wise and entertaining.”

—Betsy W. Huntley, Director of Marketing, Choate, Hall & Stewart, LLP

“In What Great Brands Know, Tracy Carlson illustrates breakthrough strategies to garner consumers attention and loyalty, sorely needed in today’s competitive and rapidly changing marketplace. With clear and engaging prose, this book provides fresh examples of successful brands as well as steps any individual or organization can employ to unleash similar creativity.”

—LeeAnne Baer, Executive Director, Consumer Research and Insights at Time, Inc.

“In her book, Tracy Carlson smartly explains how the art of commerce combines with emotional engagement to explain why successful brands live in the lives of their consumers. If you are looking for a place to start on how to make your brand sing, this book provides an excellent hymnal. I am giving this book to everyone in my marketing department so they can learn how to turn our brands into icons. Thank you, Tracy Carlson.”

—Marc Rovner, General Manager, Consumer Healthcare at Boehringer Ingelheim

“What Great Brands Know reveals the patterns of ingenuity that animate the products and companies we love. With left-brain lucidity and right-brain insight, Carlson illuminates what we have sensed dimly: product quality has a human quality. The good news is that product genius can be nurtured, and this finely crafted book delights its readers as it shows the way.”

—Eleanor Brown, James Irvine Professor of Economics, Pomona College

“In this book, Tracy demonstrates how the most successful companies blend intuition with data, and sheds light on how right brain marketers can achieve breakthroughs by valuing intuition, creativity and passion. Tracy connects the dots to help us build narratives that enhance rather than oppose data.”

--Louise Dubé, Managing Director of Digital Learning at WGBH

Edition details

• Publisher: Longstocking Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0990003906
• ISBN 13: 9780990003908
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 236
• Illustrator: Elwell Peter