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ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands

by Marty Neumeier

Summary/Book Overview:

ZAG is all about helping brands find their radical differentiator. Not just what makes the brand different but radically different—finding an entirely new market space that brand can own and defend. As the pace of business quickens and numbers of options multiply, customers decide which brands survive and which can flourish.

Brands in today’s society are constantly fighting through many types of clutter: product clutter, message clutter, and media clutter just to name a few. To ensure a brand can break through this clutter, reach its target market, and be profitable, it must develop its ZAG. In other words, “when everybody ZIGS, you ZAG.” To find a ZAG, look for ideas that are not only good but are also truly unique.

ZAG educates readers on differentiation and also employs a 17-step process to help companies and brands find, design, develop, and renew their ZAG.

Recommended Readers (who should read it (titles) and why):

Everyone who would like to understand why brands survive and how to ensure their success.
This book walks readers through how to understand and implement a process for developing a brands ‘onliness’ – being the only one in a certain space.

Top Takeaways:

  1. If you’re not zagging, you’re lagging. Businesses and brands need to constantly define and own their space in the market – the space where they are different.
  2. “Hit ‘em where they ain’t.” You can’t be a leader by following the leader. Instead you have to find the space between the fielders.
  3. Fight through the risk and cloud uncertainty to find the ZAG
  4. Think like artists – look for the “white space” in the market.
  5. A marketing budget based on zagging will appear much larger than it is. The object is to compete with the message where it can win.

About the Author:

Marty Neumeier is president of Neutron LLC, a San Francisco- based firm specializing in brand collaboration. Neumeier began his career as a graphic designer and copywriter in Southern California. In 1996 he launched CRITIQUE, the magazine of graphic design thinking, which quickly became the leading forum form improving design effectiveness. Neumeier is also the author of the popular book The Brand Gap.

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