Brand Famous

From the list of books available to review, I chose Brand Famous by Linzi Boyd because of the sub-head – ‘How to get everyone talking about your brand’. It sounded perfect: just what I needed.

It wasn’t an easy read. Not because it is intellectually difficult, but because the style, layout and presentation (Ranking gets a ‘look and feel’ inspiration credit) completely overpowered the words. Boxes, hashtags, dots, quotes, arrows, lines, numbers - all picked out in fluorescent orange everywhere on every page, made it hard to focus, read and follow the steps in any kind of order, with your eyes continually drawn to the wrong bits of the page.

Once you get past the look and feel, the book goes through things simply enough and the tone is positive and encouraging – undoubtedly, the way Linzi Boyd writes makes it all seem achieveable. And it is reassuring to see all that corporate marketing rigour stripped bare and simplified. I enjoyed the familiarity and the ease with which it was all pulled together.

From brand launch to brand fame the process is broken down into logical steps and touchpoints, interspersed at every turn with ‘dot to dot’ games. According to the author, ‘There is no better way to work on your business than to treat it as a game’. Marketing jargon and phrases are picked out and explained in boxes titled ‘Linzidedia’. But if this kind of thing doesn’t put you off, there is an awful lot of good stuff in this book: ideas, insight, experience, case studies, plus no nonsense descriptions of the kinds of processes that will sound familiar to anyone who has ever sat through a strategy presentation or a ‘what next’ planners brainstorm.

This is not a marketing text book, but a self-help bible written by a very successful evangelist who completely believes in the programme. As a guide and an inspiration for small business, I can imagine this book representing money well spent. It cuts through the mystery and offers a DIY approach for those who either can’t afford - or don’t want - the services of a brand agency. Given that, more on social media would have been an advantage.

In the end I couldn’t get comfortable with the page design and the naming of the steps. I found ‘Dot 04 # create’ (told you!), the section on influencers, useful. But in spite of the alluring sub-head, Brand Famous just wasn’t for me.

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