Know-How Exchange : Branding

Dear Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,

You might want to take a look at "Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands" by Alina Wheeler.

Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands

Alina really knows her stuff and she's a world class speaker on the subject of brands, brand management, and branding.

Two other great resources are The Brand Gap: Expanded Edition, by
Marty Neumeier.

The Brand Gap: Expanded Edition

and "Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company" by Robert Brunner

Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company

I hope these resources help you. They've certainly been incredibly helpful to me.

Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

thanks for the feedback.
To be honest, I bumped into most of these titles while browsing on Amazon but none of them focuses that much on marketing research.
I'm starting to suspect nothing of the kind exists.

What I need is closer in spirit to a first-hand account written by a Consumer & Market Insight or Senior Researcher and focusing on how companies deal with branding, not in general terms but in very practical terms (which players to involve, which type of research to use, sampling, qualitative vs. quantitative, etc.)
What makes your consumers tick? How do they perceive the category? Are there white spaces to be exploited? Are there macro-trends you can ride on? How do you balance between listening to the consumer and listening to trend analysts/opinion leaders? Does semiotics add any value? Which agencies provide the best market potential modeling?

I've been dealing with some of these issues personally and I know there are many ways to do it (you can say what you want but, to this day, marketing research is still in its infancy with a lot of room for improvement and innovation...and a lot of room for different debate).
Sometimes it's just refreshing to read something that puts an order to what you have experienced in a not so orderly way and gives a name to approaches which you have been using without knowing it. It's soothing and can actually provide some food for thought.