Primalbranding : Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company, and Your Future

In one of the most original books of its kind ever written, Patrick Hanlon explains how the most powerful brands create a community of believers around the brand, revealing the seven components that will help every company and marketer capture the public imagination -- and seize a bigger slice of the pie. What is the magic glue that adheres consumers to Google, Mini Cooper, and Oprah, but not to others? Why do many brands with great product innovation, perfect locations, terrific customer experiences, even breakthrough advertising fail to get the same visceral traction in the marketplace that brands like Apple, Starbucks, or Nike have? After years of working with famous brands like Absolut, Ford Motor Company, LEGO, Disney, Montblanc, Sara Lee, and others, Patrick Hanlon, senior advertising executive and founder of Thinktopia, decided to find the answers. His search revealed seven definable assets that together construct the belief system that lies behind every successful brand, whether it's a product, service, city, personality, social cause, or movement. In Primal branding,Hanlon explores those seven components, known as the primal code, and shows how to use and combine them to create a community of believers in which the consumer develops a powerful emotional attachment to the brand. These techniques work for everyone involved in creating and selling an image -- from marketing managers to social advocates to business leaders seeking to increase customer preference for new or existing products. Primal brandingpresents a world of new possibility for everyone trying to spark public appeal -- and the opportunity to move from being just another product on the shelf to becoming a desired and necessary part of the culture.

As a senior executive at the world's most creative advertising agencies, including TBWA, Ogilvy, Hal Riney & Partners, and Lowe & Partners in New York City, Patrick Hanlon has worked on such famous brands as Absolut, UPS, John Deere, H&R Block, LEGO, General Motors, BellSouth, Pepsi International, Sears, and IBM. In August 2003, he founded Thinktopia and began sharing his proprietary new primal branding construct with marketers from Target, Starbucks, American Express, and elsewhere. It was immediately hailed as "a provocative new look at classic branding." Others simply cheer that primal branding is "not the same old branding B.S." After a decade of working on Madison Avenue, the author is now headquartered in Minneapolis, where he serves Fortune 500 clients across the country.