Brand Harmony presents a fresh and revealing approach to branding and explains how companies of all types and sizes can achieve dynamic results by orchestrating their customers' total experience. Brand Harmony is a breakthrough concept that aligns everyone in a company to deliver a powerful, harmonious message to customers.Full of common-sense wisdom, Brand Harmony dispels the myths about branding and shows how companies can successfully create Brand Harmony in the minds of their customers by aligning the entire organization to tell one cumulative story. Brand Harmony takes marketing beyond the marketing department by showing how people throughout an organization need to be the brand in order to create comprehensive, company-wide messages that customers will understand and believe. Brand Harmony includes 10 how-to exercises based on Yastrow's proven methods and real-life examples which walk the reader through each stage of the branding process. "...required reading for all of our employees" -- Craig Dwight, Chairman & CEO, Horizon Bancorp "Clear, compelling and powerful. Branding in all its power and glory made accessible and exciting." -- Tom Peters, Tom Peters Company An important read for the young practitioner to the most senior executive, this common sense approach for business is timeless. -- Paul D. Schrage, Senior Executive Vice President of Marketing, Retired, McDonald s Corporation If your marketing person won t spend the time to do the exercises in this book, it's time to replace her. -- Seth Godin, Author, Purple Cow Steve completely changed the way our company looks at marketing. This book will be a must-read for my employees. -- Carsten Pederson, President, Club 8 USA The average American consumer is constantly bombarded with advertising messages: on TV and radio, in newspapers and magazines, on billboards while we drive. The situation has come to be viewed as such an annoyance by the targeted public that the federal government has had to institute no-call lists to cut down on these intrusions into our own homes. This media cacophony is a result of the outmoded strategy of Brute Force Branding, the tactic of heavy-handedly forcing an inflexible message on the body of consumers. Author Steve Yastrow offers an alternative with Brand Harmony, and demonstrates that your brand – the desired perception of your product or service by the consumer – is not what you say you are, but what your customer thinks you are. Drawing on his years of experience consulting for such corporate entities as the McDonald’s Corporation and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Yastrow hones the idea of branding to bring it more in line with modern media and the resultant increase in customer power. After finishing Brand Harmony, the reader will not only have a new way in which to look at his or her customer, but will also reexamine the role that each and every company employee can play in an effort to "Be the Brand" and increase company performance. One misconception is the idea that the strongest brands are the ones that are known by the most people. Every August, Business Week magazine comes out with a cover story listing out the "best" brands in the world, but, in actuality, it is a measure of the biggest brands, not the best brands. Awareness is the most overrated branding characteristic; it is only one of many factors that determine a brand’s strength. For example, let’s say that there is a small, family-owned Italian restaurant in your town, which has a committed, loyal following in the neighborhood. Imagine there is also an Olive Garden restaurant nearby, which has twice as many tables and is part of an 1800 restaurant chain. The Olive Garden does fairly well, but its customers aren’t nearly as loyal as the small restaurant’s, and it constantly has to keep promoting to bring in new customers. Whose brand is better in your town? The small restaurant gets lots of business because people believe in it. More people around the country may know Olive Garden’s name, but, in your town, their brand is clearly not as strong as that of their small competitor. Another major misconception about branding is that people believe that companies can brand their customers. That’s 180 degrees wrong. In reality, customers brand companies and their products. Marketers think they can imprint their brand messages on their customers by applying the brute force of advertising, reminiscent of the way cowboys use their power to brand helpless calves. Today’s highly empowered customers won’t let that happen. The tables are turned. Customers decide for themselves what to think about companies and their products by evaluating every experience they have with that company and its products. Customers have the power to define their own brand impressions. STEVE YASTROW is president of Yastrow Marketing, a consulting firm which has served clients such as McDonald's Corporation, Tom Peters Company, The Cayman Islands Department of Tourism, Wyndh