have only just finished reading John Grant’s “Brand Innovation Manifesto” and the first comment I have is to go out and buy it now. My copy already has a lot of earmarked pages and coffee stains – all signs of provocative thinking.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first the first the Grant advances (or perhaps restates) his arguments that the era of brand image is over and that we need to move to a different way of constructing brands - one of constant/consistent brand innovation. This shift is akin to a move from marketing modernism to marketing post-modernism, driven by media overload, marketing literacy and the need for business speed.

To adapt to this new era, Grant argues we need to think of brands as clusters of strategic cultural ideas. This helps us move away from thinking about brand messaging or a unitary strategy, and into thinking about brands as cultural activators, creators or (at the very least) participants. He proposes that we use a brand molecule structure to articulate how these cultural ideas fit together (or are coherent) and how we can build outward from the core.

The molecule idea (to me) is a useful way of looking at the brand as constantly evolving set of ideas. It forces you to keep to a core set of (strategic, cultural) equities, yet also continuously change. In fact, I found it literally hard to look at the molecules in the book without wanting to add to them. This is why I like the term organic marketing as a way of thinking about or couching the concept– it introduces a more natural, evolutionary way of building a brand. I have to admit that it is hard to move away from wanting to boil everything dwon to one strategy and looking for the cultural ideas to be more cohesive. IN fact, it would have been great of the book had spent more time talking about/arguing for chesions vs. more concrete links. My other through is with the way the examples of molecules are presented and explained – it is hard to see where and the how the elements/cultural ideas of the molecules got their start. It is easy to post rationalize about it, but it would have been interesting to hear from his personal experience of how he combined cultural ideas to start a molecule. Otherwise, what ends up happening for me is that I see how core attributes of the brand are built, but not how cultural ideas are linked or combined to transform a brand (and therefore it feels tactical).

This harder part - building the cultural core of the brand – is where the second part of the book focuses. The book lays out a periodic table of brands – 32 different cultural ideas used in different categories (either as the core of the product/service or a platform) that can be reapplied to your situation. It is amusing confirmation of what many planners thought – there are probably only a finite number of strategies out there, so don’t stress about reusing them.

This table is an incredibly useful tool as well as showing a different way of looking at or reframing brands. The challenge in using it is that even the platform examples in the book are examples (or are expressed through) tactics which were single points in time vs. a strategic thread (albeit an evolving one). Has IBM really kept on a cognitive path by creating new ideas like e-business? Maybe this is asking too much – there are very few brands which have taken this enlightened point of view. And maybe not expressing a specific strategic thread is the point - it would have lead to too much stagnation through a focus on consistency. If that is the case, the author should probably have restated it a few more times and given examples of brands with promising starts that failed by not being fluid enough.

Now, it is very possible that I am missing the point here somewhere or am just v. thick. IN addition, I don’t want to give the impression that the book was not instructive, intelligent and well worth the money – it is.

I am going to put a lot of this thinking to the test for a pitch I am involved in – and as soon as the pitch is over, will post on the results!