Summary of Zag by Marty Neumeier

Takeaway

• The marketplace is swamped with clutter due to companies imitating one another to capture customers.
• But customers don’t like and block clutter, making those companies invisible to their eyes.
• While everyone is adding more clutter to their band and products (more features, more choice, more colors), you should do the opposite and add less.
• A zag is a unique feature or quality that helps you stand out in the market.
• Your zag should be built out across your entire brand and inform everything, from the name to the concept to the customers.

What Zag Talks About

Zag is a branding book written by Marty Neumeier. It gives a complete step-by-step plan explaining how brands can differentiate themselves from the competition.

It’s a good book but its principles are dated now. It’s a great introduction to branding for novices but people familiar with the topic should probably skip it.

8/10.

Get the book here.

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Summary of Zag Written by Marty Neumeier

The number of companies and brands and the speed of business have been increasing, resulting in the following consequences:

1. Customers are now deciding which brands succeed and which don’t.
2. An overabundance of products and services led customers to find something to differentiate themselves from the rest.

The secret to building a brand is not to do like everyone else but to do something different – if not the opposite. The author calls it “finding your zag“, meaning, finding that thing that will make your brand stand out.

Introduction

We live in a world where everything is faster and where we have more of everything which has created five types of clutter in the marketplace.

1. Product clutter: too many products and services.
2. Feature clutter: too many features in each product.
3. Advertising clutter: too many media messages.
4. Message clutter: too many elements per message.
5. Media clutter: too many competing channels.

Companies add clutter (features, etc) to differentiate themselves then their competitors copy them and create even more clutter.

Customers are not responsive to clutter and block it, rendering the brand invisible. On the other hand, customers are responsive to the ideas that already exist in their minds, which is what you should focus on.

Across history, companies have used various methods to survive in the business landscape.

First, successful companies focused on owning the means of production. Then it evolved into owning technology, then factories and their workers, then getting access to capital, then to intellectual capital (patents).

Today, the barriers to competition are customers’ preferences.

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company

Companies create brands to define themselves in a world of clutter.

A brand is not controlled as it’s not defined by what you say about it, but by what your consumers say about it.

Its purpose is to delight customers so that more people buy more and more expensive things.

In the past, brands sought to focus on a USP to thrive; today, they should focus on a unique group of people instead as a purchase no longer serves a material or practical purpose, but an identitarian one.

Traditional advertising is losing efficiency because people don’t trust it and because it’s a one-way communication channel, displeasing customers who want to interact with the brand.

Resultantly, traditional advertising became even more intrusive, which further accelerated its downfall.

People want trust; they don’t want clutter, empty claims, and intrusiveness.

So in a world of extreme clutter, you need to be different.

Traditional differentiation is about adding the latest feature, a new color, etc.

Radical differentiation is about finding or creating a whole new market space.

When everyone zigs, you should zag.

To differentiate yourself, you should master the following:

1. Finding your zag
2. Designing your zag
3. Building your zag
4. Renewing your zag

Part 1: Finding Your Zag

Most companies are afraid of doing something that nobody else does, hence making it hard to differentiate.

Your purpose isn’t to become better or different, but both.

Most companies desire – and stand – in the upper left corner.

Finding a new market space is difficult because most people see what there is – they cannot see what there isn’t.

The best way to do so is to look for something people are trying to get done and help them get it done, or to look for an underserved customer segment, or spot and ride a trend.

Part 2: Designing Your Zag

In the Brand Gap, the author explained that brand building was about:

1. Differentiation
2. Collaboration
3. Innovation
4. Validation
5. Cultivation

But Zag is about differentiation, which has a 17-step process and four key elements:

• Differentiation
• Focus
• Trend
• Communication

Checkpoint 1: Who are you?

What is your passion, your mission, your desire? Where does the energy of building your company come from?

Checkpoint 2: What do you do?

What is your core purpose? Why does your company exist?

It shouldn’t take more than 12 words.

Checkpoint 3: What’s your vision?

A vision is a definite image of what your company will look like in the future.

Checkpoint 4: What wave are you riding?

What trend are you riding?

Checkpoint 5: Who shares the brandscape?

Companies often push forward three or four values coming from a set of about the same twelve ones.

You should instead define yourself by what makes you unique, not admirable.

Given that the biggest company gets twice the share of the second leader, you should aim at being either number 1 or number 2.

Below 3, you should probably start a new market.

Checkpoint 6: What makes you the “only”?

Complete this sentence: Our brand is the only company that does whatever you do that does that unique thing that you do.

Eg: Our brand is the only pizza brand that tastes like the pizza from Naples.

If you can’t keep it brief or use the word only, then you don’t have a zag. Make a list of all of your competitors and try to shift away from what they do.

If you can’t say you are the “only” in something, start over.

Here’s an exercise to help you define how unique you are:

• What is your category?
• How are you different?
• Who are your customers?
• Where are they located?
• When do they need you?
• Why are you important?

An onliness statement provides a framework for your zag. Once you’ve defined your point of differentiation, you have a decisional filter for all your company’s future decisions.

Checkpoint 7: What should you add or substract?

One of the most powerful principles in building a brand is focused alignment, but it’s hardly practiced nowadays because people love adding new things and hardly take off any.

Brand alignment is the practice of linking your business strategy to customer experience—aligning all your company behaviors behind a clearly articulated zag. There should be no leftover parts, no maverick offerings, no contradiction between what you say and what you do. The result of alignment is coherence; the result of nonalignment is wasted resources.

If adding a new element to your brand increases competition with a stronger brand, don’t do it. You will confuse customers.

The quickest route to a zag is to look at what competitors do, then do something different.

Checkpoint 8: Who loves you?

A brand is built by a community of people, including your customers, suppliers, and all of the other people in your life.

Who are these people?

Checkpoint 9: Who’s the enemy?

Don’t try to please everyone. Rather, pick up a fight with a competitor, but make sure it’s the biggest one so that it increases the size of the differentiation.

Sometimes, the enemy can simply be the old way of doing things.

Checkpoint 10: What do they call you?

A brand’s most valuable asset is its name. Make sure your name is unique and distinctive.

A name should be:

• Different than those of competitors
• Brief—four syllables or less
• Appropriate, but not so descriptive that it sounds generic
• Easy to spell
• Satisfying to pronounce
• Suitable for “brandplay,”
• Legally defensible

Checkpoint 11: How do you explain yourself?

All brand communications should emanate from an internal positioning line, or “trueline.”

It must be something that your competitors can’t claim (or won’t) and something that your customers find both valuable and credible.

Eg:

• Southwest Airlines: “You can fly anywhere for less than it costs to drive”.
• Harley-Davidson: “Join a gang of American rebels”.

Once you have this “trueline”, you can turn it into a tagline.

Remember that a brand isn’t about what you say, but about what your customers say about it.

Checkpoint 12: How do you spread the word?

Now that you have your brand, trueline, and tagline, you can deploy them across strategic touchpoints so that your future customers can learn about it.

Checkpoint 13: How do people engage with you?

To figure this out, you need to define what you sell and how you are going to do so. Find the empty spaces where your competition isn’t doing anything and fill it up.

What can your company offer that your competitors can’t, or won’t?

The best rule to follow when mapping your value proposition is to forget about so-called best practices. Best practices are usually common practices. And common practices will never add up to a zag, no matter how many of them you apply.

Checkpoint 14: What do they experience?

Without good execution, strategy is only a plan.

Customers experience your brand at specific touchpoints, so choosing what those touchpoints are, and influencing what happens there, is important work. The best way to start choosing and influencing your touchpoints is by mapping your customers’ journey from awareness to brand loyalty.

Figure out where to invest your marketing resources and where not to.

Checkpoint 15: How do you earn their loyalty?

It’s important to make your customers loyal as it will generate much more money for you.

That’s why most brands have developed loyalty programs, but most don’t work because:

1. They’re based on discounts which train customers to wait for lower prices.
2. They attract loyal customers who would happily pay a premium should it not exist.
3. They discourage new customers by making them feel excluded.
4. They compel competitors to offer the same thing and drag you into a race to the bottom.
5. They reduce profit margins.
6. They prevent the company from serving its customers well.

Loyalty cannot be controlled – it can only be earned. When customers feel watched, they flee.

Checkpoint 16: How do you extend your success?

Brand extension makes sense when trying to increase profits, but it can be dangerous.

There are two models to choose from to deal with brand extension.

1. The house of brands (Unilever) where a company maintains a large array of brands. Each brand is free and will not negatively (or positively) influence one another but the downside is that they have to be built separately.
2. Branded house (Apple, Xiaomi) where the company itself is the brand and has all of its products under it. The advantage is that all the products and services can share the same market position but they won’t benefit equally from the company brand.

Both models can be effective but they should never be mixed up.

Both models require careful management, so that each brand and subbrand has a well-defined role to play in the overall lineup.

Checkpoint 17: How do you protect your portfolio?

More and more companies are abandoning the house of brands for the branded house, but this can lead to the four following problems.

1. Contagion: if one brand has a problem, it may impact the other brands.
2. Confusion: don’t overextend your brand as it will confuse the customers (don’t come up with 17 different options for your product). Stickiness is a concept defining the unique meaning of your brand in the customers’ minds; stretchiness is the extent to which that association can be stretched without breaking. The temptation to stretch is great but companies should absolutely avoid it. Stretch as much as the stickiness allows it and do not go beyond.
3. Contradiction: It occurs when a company extends its brand globally, as this brand can mean different things in different cultures. It’s better to build a separate brand in each culture.
4. Complexity: Multiple segments, products, extensions, and complex distribution channels can easily create an overgrown, hard-to-manage, inefficient brand portfolio.

Subtraction is the key to building strong portfolios.

Part 3: Renewing Your Zag

If focus is so important, how can so many unfocused companies grow so large?

Those companies work because some of their products are highly focused and work well as a result, which compensates for those who do not.

Business history suggests that companies thrive best when they settle into “stable states,” conditions in which the business environment is fairly predictable and employees have confidence in what they’re doing.

There are three types of companies:

1. Scissors: small, hyper-focused startup with one product or less, that moves really fast.
2. Rock: medium-sized company in a stable and predictable environment.
3. Paper: a large company that does a lot of things.

Scissors usually eat the paper companies, paper companies eat the rocks, and the rocks eat the scissors.

There are two types of innovation:

• Sustaining: incremental innovation.
• Disruptive: find new markets and space.

Disruptive innovations enable the scissors to beat up the paper, which, too afraid to lose their market, moves to protect it rather than innovate and kill it. This is the innovator’s dilemma.

When the scissor evolves into a rock, the paper company suddenly pays attention and decides to match the innovation.

Companies stop growing when the employees and culture get stuck into a routine and stop innovating.

The point of resistance, whatever it may be, must be sacrificed to unlock the needed creativity to get the company back on track.

The market is moving extremely fast today. The only way to survive is to move and innovate at the same speed.

To do this you’ll need to shorten the span between invention and introduction. You’ll need to launch white-space brands while core brands are still performing. You’ll need to organize the company around brand collaboration. You’ll need to beat marketplace clutter instead of adding to it. And you’ll need to build a culture that thrives on radical differentiation.

For more summaries, head to auresnotes.com.

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