Laura Busche - Lean Branding: Creating Dynamic Brands to Generate Conversion

Lean Branding: Creating Dynamic Brands to Generate Conversion

Laura Busche

Beijing Cambridge Farnham Kln Sebastopol Tokyo

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Praise for Lean Branding

If youve got a product and your thoughts about branding are I dont even know where to start read Lean Branding. Laura Busches book lays out for you what you need to do, why it matters, and how to do it quickly and easily. Youll have a brand as great as your product in no time.

Cindy AlvarezDirector of User Experience, Yammer (a Microsoft company), author of Lean Customer Development

Establishing a brand for a startup or small enterprise in todays marketplace is more important than ever. Lean Branding is a practical, insightful guide that will quickly prove its worth in an often-overlooked area that is fundamental to the success of every business. It should be in every entrepreneurs toolkit.

Roy ThomassonFounder and Chair, Board of Directors, Young Americas Business Trust, Washington, DC

If you want your startup to fail then ignore this book. Branding has always been a soft skill. Laura makes it a hard science.

Bronson TaylorCofounder, Growth Hacker TV

As editor of Smashing Magazine, I have had several opportunities to work with Laura and her writing is always flawless. However, the writing is always approachable; as if she is standing in front of you explaining things to you. In her own words: I decided to take a look at brands from three different lenses: business, design, and psychology. And this is what makes this book unique: a combination of her personal writing style and looking at branding from a larger scope and perspective. As a design educator, this is a book I would definitely like to use in my design classes.

Alma HoffmannAssistant Professor, University of South Alabama, Editor of the Design section at Smashing Magazine

Lean Branding is a book that anyone concerned with their brand startups, small businesses, marketersshould have in their library and refer to over and over again. Laura Busche guides you through the ins-and-outs of creating a brand and she includes some amazing worksheets and tools for all aspects of the process of the brand creation lifecycle. I cant wait to get this for all my startup clients.

Erin MalonePartner, Tangible UX, LLC

An intuitive step-by-step guide to developing and promoting your company or startups brand. Easy to follow and implement, Lean Branding manages to discuss topics such as marketing with sincerity and integrity.

Carmen MedinaRebels at Work.com

Laura Busche has written a deeply insightful book that offers readers apragmatic approach for turning a bunch of features into branded products thatcustomers buy. Branding is not something that comes easily to engineers, but Lauras bookmakes the topic approachable.

Kelly GoetschDirector, Product Management, Oracle, OReilly author

Im a technologist, not a brand manager...well, until now. Lean Branding changed everything I thought about branding, and gave me exactly the tools I needed to develop and execute the brands for my startups.

Eric FreemanPhD, cofounder WickedlySmart, OReilly author and former CTO, Disney Online

When new startup teams begin learning the Lean Startup methodology, they often ask me when the period of experimentation will end so they can start building the real product. I have to break it to them that theres no such thing as the final productevery product launch is an opportunity to discover how to better delight the customer. The Build-Measure-Learn process begins when we ask what we are hoping to discover about our customer or our strategyand it should continue long after our first product launch.

At the core of Lean Branding is the idea that just as products are never truly finished, brands, too, must be committed to adaption and evolution. Companies cannot afford to let their brands stagnate or think of them as a set of features, argues Laura Busche. Instead, they must build chameleon brands that adapt to consumers ever-changing needs and desires by putting their assumptions to the test and using what theyve learned to iterate and adapt.

This is easier said than done.

Ive worked with builders from many different sectors. Even if the materials they work with are very differentsome write code, others build healthcare devices or heavy industrial equipment, still others design user experienceswhat they share is a desire to use their expertise to build high-quality products to present to customers. But the Lean Startup methodology challenges us to rethink the notion of quality. The Build-Measure-Learn loop is a way to overcome the very human tendency to over-engineer solutions before weve tested whether our solution has anything to do with a real customer problem.

Busche also discusses the importance of measuring the right things. The metrics-obsessed among us can get very excited by any sign that were getting some tractionbut its important to distinguish between vanity metrics (the ones that look good on paper but tell us nothing about our potential for growth) and actionable metrics (data we can learn from and use to further the process of experimentation and iteration).

In the section on Measurement, Busche provides some useful examples of the metrics that matterthe ones that are connected to the way our businesses make money or grow our customer base. Only by changing customer behavior in some waywhether customers make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, agree to share their time or make some other exchange of valuecan we be sure that our experiments were a success. This process of experimentation and measuring what our customers value is also a way to foster deep relationships over timethe hallmark of successful brand development and a great way, Id argue, to deliver products and services that deserve the title high-quality.

Eric Ries

San Francisco, CA

September 3, 2014

Why I Wrote This Book

Ive had it. I cant stand to see another killer product ignored by the press, investors, and customers because its founders had no clue about branding. Because they didnt have the time, resources, and knowledge to turn the right heads around, at the right time. Maybe that product is an app, a service, a combination of both...maybe that product is you !

Good products shouldnt have to die because we failed to send their message across.