I’ve worked in branding for the better part of two decades, which means I’ve consumed an almost embarrassing amount of content about brands.
Books, podcasts, talks. Courses and case studies. Awards and annuals. Trend reports. Strategy decks. Interviews with founders. Interviews with strategists. Interviews with founders interviewing strategists.
Some of it fundamentally changed the way I think.
A lot of it could have been a LinkedIn post.
If someone came to me today and said, I want to get stunningly good at brand strategy. Where do I start? (which tbh happens almost every week), I wouldn’t send them off to do a $20,000 course.
I’d give them my compulsory reading list below.
Then I’d tell them to get out of the branding section.
Because one of the biggest things I’ve learnt about brand is that you cannot become exceptional at it by only studying brands.
Brand sits somewhere between business, psychology, culture, language, design and human behaviour. You need to understand positioning and distinctiveness, yes. But you also need to understand why people want things. Why something becomes culturally relevant. Why one idea sticks while another disappears. Why a sentence makes you feel something. Why everyone suddenly starts wearing the same shoe. Why one restaurant is booked for three months and the equally good one next door isn’t.
The branding books give you frameworks.
Everything else gives you an eye.
So this isn’t an exhaustive list of the Best Branding Resources Ever™. Although, it kinda is.
It’s my unofficial curriculum: the things I’d point you towards if you wanted to learn how I think about brands.
Start with what a brand actually is
The first branding book I’d probably hand someone is Marty Neumeier’s The Brand Gap.
Partly because you can read it in an afternoon.
And partly because it does something surprisingly few branding books manage to do: makes the whole thing feel simple without making it simplistic.
Neumeier’s premise is essentially about bridging the gap between strategy and creative execution. His five disciplines: differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate and cultivate, give you a way of understanding brand as something much bigger than an identity system.
I think that’s an important place to start because one of the most persistent misunderstandings about branding is still that brand = how something looks.
It isn’t.
The visual identity is an expression of the brand.
Brand is the bigger thing underneath it.
It’s the idea. It’s the position. The reputation. The expectation.
The entire feeling, or dare Is ay it - the AURA of the entity.
The collection of associations someone has accumulated about you before you’ve even entered the room.
Once you understand that, everything else gets considerably more interesting.
Then learn positioning
If I could force founders to understand one thing before they brief a branding agency, (or brand specialists learning the ropes), it would probably be positioning.
No amount of beautiful typography can rescue a business that hasn’t figured out why anyone should choose it.
April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome is one of the clearest practical resources I’ve found for this. Her methodology breaks positioning down into components including competitive alternatives, differentiated capabilities, customer value and the market context that makes that value obvious. The updated 2026 edition expands the process further, but the core idea remains wonderfully useful: positioning isn’t a sentence you fill in at the end of a workshop. It’s the context that helps someone understand why your thing matters.
And this is where I’d probably interrupt the curriculum with my first piece of advice:
Don’t memorise the frameworks. Instead, learn to see the problem they’re solving.
Because eventually you want to be able to walk into a business and instinctively think: Oh. You’re talking about the wrong thing.
That’s strategy.
A little something extra for paid subscribers
I’ve written a 40-page brand strategy ebook to go with this article: the frameworks, questions and thinking I’d use to interrogate or build a brand from the ground up.
Think of this article as the compulsory reading list.
And the ebook as my guide to becoming a great brand strategist.
Paid subscribers can download it below, along with the rest of my unofficial brand curriculum.
