Relevance: Making Stuff That Matters by Tim Manners

From the Publisher

After years studying remarkable companies and speaking to some of the most influential leaders around, Tim Manners has discovered a solution to the marketing woes of many brands. Stop worrying about demographics, fads, and cutting-edge advertising. Instead, focus on relevance.

Manners shares how the best of the best create solutions to their customers' problems and help them live happier lives. You'll learn how:

• Levi's reasserted relevance when it created wardrobe solutions for men.
• Dunkin' Donuts stopped trying to mimic the look and feel of Starbucks and found success by delivering a simple, quick cup of joe.
• Hasbro reinvented board games for today's time-pressed consumers.
• Kleenex's new germ-fighting tissues helped keep the company relevant by turning a useful product into a necessary one.
• Staples stopped wasting its shoppers' time with extraneous products.
• Nintendo's simple design for the Wii appealed to consumers of all ages and game designers alike, allowing it to outsell its competitors.

The path to sustainable growth for your brand begins with designing meaningful solutions and providing them when and where people need them most. Relevance will teach you how to become—and remain—indispensable.

Publishers Weekly

Manners, a branding consultant and editor, takes the reader through the various aspects of building a successful brand, using the title of his book as a one word manifesto; all of his ideas loop back to it sooner or later. Branding is no longer a numbers game, according to the experts that he quotes, but about making your sure your customer is happy; not just with the service, or the product, but in their lives. How can this be achieved? The author's answer: through relevant insights, innovation, investment and design. Combine these with careful attention to value and experience, and you'll get growth. What distinguishes this book is the author's scope: he's clearly well connected and has plenty of quotes from branding and marketing experts across several industries to prove it. British range manufacturer Aga and niche coffee retailer Intelligentsia are just two of the "relevant" brands that Manners explores, and this range of knowledge adds authority to an otherwise thin argument, which at times seems like the same old ideas, rehashed and rebranded.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

What People Are Saying

John Gilbert
"Manners has done what so few business writers manage to do: get inside the heads of the practitioners . . . and capture their real stories. He writes delightfully about real problems with real solutions. I read it once for fun. Then I read it again, for real."--(John Gilbert, chief marketing officer, the TJX Companies, Inc.)

Watts Wacker
"In a world where culture is lived mostly through its inauthenticity, should we not expect that most brands are weaned on lack of relevance? Tim Manners does a masterful job of helping marketers identify irrelevance and re-create and reclaim truth in their brands."--(Watts Wacker, futurist and CEO, FirstMatter)

Jim Garrity
"Tim Manners has uniquely captured proven marketing strategies as told by hundreds of the world's most successful, forward-thinking, and insightful marketing leaders. Newly appointed brand managers and seasoned CMOs alike will benefit from the wisdom of this book."--(Jim Garrity, former executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Wachovia)

Stephen M. Berkov
"The ability to stay relevant is the challenge any brand faces. Manners has addressed the key to what creates marketing effectiveness-or failure-in this much-needed quick read."--(Stephen M. Berkov, executive director, client strategy, Edmunds.com)

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents