In my earlier book, THE BRAND GAP, I showed that brand-building isn’t a series of isolated activities, but a complete system in which five disciplines—differentiation, collaboration, innovation, validation, and cultivation—combine to produce a sustainable competitive advantage. My intent with ZAG is to zoom in on differentiation to reveal the system within the system.
While the previous section gave you clues for finding your zag, this section offers a process for designing it. I use the word design as economist Herbert Simon used it: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” The preferred situation in this case is a compelling brand based on radical differentiation. The course of action is a brand strategy that zags.
All design relies on heuristic thinking more than algorithmic thinking—meaning that there is no set path, no mathematical formula, for reaching your goal. But you still need rigor and process, otherwise you’ll drift from one thought to the next with no more hope of it making sense than the proverbial thousand monkeys with their thousand typewriters.
WHEN FOCUS IS PAIRED WITH DIFFERENTIATION, SUPPORTED BY A TREND, AND SURROUNDED BY COMPELLING COMMUNICATIONS, YOU HAVE THE BASIC INGREDIENTS OF A ZAG.
In this section I’ll share the 17 checkpoints we use at Neutron to coach our clients through the zag design process. Each checkpoint addresses one of four key elements—differentiation, focus, trend, and communications—indicated by the small diagram at the end of each checkpoint.
To demonstrate how the 17-step process works, I’ve included examples from an exercise we use in our branding workshops. The object is to build a brand for a fictitious chain of wine bars. Of course, no single example can stand in for the entire range of brand types, but it should help you to visualize the leap from principles to practice.