Entrepreneur's Guide to the Lean Brand: How Brand Innovation Builds Passion, Transforms Organizations and Creates Value

Goodbye, old-school branding. Hello, innovation.

As much as traditional branding may flinch at the idea, the great brands emerging today are no longer being developed by a “brand genius” on the 40th floor of a Madison Avenue high rise. Today, great brand development isn’t about genius, it’s about the discovery of value. The Lean Brand is the first book to apply lean principles to the marketing black box of branding empowering innovators to experiment often, iterate quickly, and discover the winning relationship with their audience. Just as with “lean startup,” where you are attempting to eliminate the waste in building products no one wants, “lean branding” is about eliminating the waste of building a brand no one wants a relationship with. The cost of failing to innovate with your brand? Millions of dollars in lost sales, missed opportunities for growth, and countless unsatisfied customers. This is not new jargon for old thinking, but a fundamental shift in how brand development works. The Lean Brand is the new blueprint for building value-based relationships with passionate customers. Distilling years of experience on the frontlines of startup marketing and the lean startup movement, Jeremiah Gardner teams up with New York Times bestselling author Brant Cooper to reveal:

• How to implement Lean Brand Innovation To Discover, Create & Deliver New Value
• New startup marketing techniques for Parallel Innovation between product management, brand strategy, and business culture
• How to optimize your branding strategy to discover, develop and build passionate customers
• How startups can eliminate waste in their customer development and brand strategy using The Lean Brand Framework
• How to use lean startup Viability Experiments to test and iterate your brand for high growth
• A set of practical tools called the Lean Brand Stack to help you iterate quickly, learn as much as you can, and build passionate relationships with your audience

Great brands must do more than just satisfy customers; they must create passionate ones. The Lean Brand shows you how to develop meaningful relationships with your audience, based on a shared journey of value creation. Whether incrementally improving an existing brand, re-branding your enterprise, or building the next great startup, the winning relationship with your audience will come from a process of discovery. This book lays out a brand innovation framework for you to study, practice and iterate on, and eventually make your own.

Jeremiah Gardner is an author, speaker, lean brand practitioner, and bulldog lover. He helps startups, entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 organizations reframe the way they think about brand innovation, culture, and leadership. He is a sought after speaker, and has been featured in several media outlets including Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Lifehacker, The Guardian, Branding Magazine, and SayDaily.