📂 7 branding books every SaaS founder needs to read

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Today's newsletter is written by my Conversion Factory cofounder, Zach Stevens.

He's the best designer I know and has deep experience with SaaS.

Since I graduated from SDSU in 2016, I’ve read over 50 books on branding, marketing, design, business strategy, and general “get-your-shit-together” self-help literature.

These pages distill complex ideas into actionable chunks that empower a designer in jeans, sneakers, and t-shirt to sit with the C-Suite during strategy meetings and navigate complex problems.

Scouring the internet, I saw plenty of book lists catered to SaaS founders on every one of the above subjects… except branding.

Which is sad, since all SaaS founders are building a brand and want the loyal fandom that comes from solid branding.

Let’s change that.

Here are the 7 branding books every SaaS founder should read:

1) The Brand Gap

By Marty Neumeier

At the top of the list is the Brand Gap and for one, crucial reason:

If you want to build a brand, you should first define what a brand is.

Most founders confine the concept of branding to logo design and this has been repeated by sites like Fiverr and Wix who claim they can get you a “brand” in 5 minutes for $5, which is garbage.

Among other tectonic shifts in your mindset, the Brand Gap condenses branding into one, actionable definition:

A brand is the gut-feeling toward an entity, person, or place.

Once I understood this concept, it became clear that every decision I make as a designer must be centered around the emotions a brand is supposed to illicit from users.

More importantly, that emotional understanding is widely applicable to every touchpoint of a business, including product development, sales, marketing, and more.

As an added bonus, this book is pretty short and can be read over the course of a quick plane ride.

2) Building a Story Brand

By Donald Miller

What was so profound about Donald Miller’s book was how he reframed the way companies should view their customers.

Every story has a hero and, in the case building a SaaS product, most founders it’s them and their product.

False.

Building a Story Brand course corrects this notion and places your user as the protagonist and your brand as a respected guide that gives the hero tools, resources, and wisdom to defeat an adversary.

In nerd terms,

you

are Obi-Wan Kenobi and

your users

are Luke Skywalker (or Haymitch : Katniss, Gandalf : Frodo, take your pick, I’ve got more 😉)

Miller also provides a series of frameworks for creating a clear and compelling brand message that resonates with users and how to apply the story method to your brand.

3) Brands and Bullshit

By Bern Schroeder

When I was a young lad at SDSU, my boss and mentor, Bern, who built a billion-dollar integrated marketing agency, challenged me to think beyond the tactical implementation of design and strategically approach it in a branding context.

He referred me to Marty Neumeier’s work and changed my mindset completely.

A year after I graduated he wrote this banger.

Brands and Bullshit is a splash of cold water for anyone marketing a product and expanding the offerings within a brand portfolio, especially in the realm of digital where scattered tactical marketing efforts can crumble the trust and uniform direction needed to build a coveted brand.

What I love most about this book is the pen-to-paper exercises for top-level decisions that show where to take a brand and what to avoid. Some examples include: avoiding the damage of an unwarranted brand extension or how to integrate acquisition targets into a brand portfolio without crippling it.

4) Primal Branding

By Patrick Hanlon

Patrick Hanlon’s Primal Branding is essential for SaaS founders because it emphasizes the importance of storytelling and creating a strong emotional connection with customers.

Specifically, Hanlon argues that in order to build a successful brand, founders must craft a compelling creation story that explains the company’s mission and values and that they cannot hide in a tower while their empire is being built.

By sharing their personal journey and the reasons behind why they created their software, founders can establish a deeper connection with their audience and differentiate themselves from competitors.

This principle, among the other 7 pillars (the creation story, the leader, the creed, the leader, the pagans, the icons, and the sacred words), frames branding in an anthropological standpoint, which I found fascinating.

If you’re gonna standout in a marketplace that is growing as fast as software, it is essential to create a strong brand that captures the attention of users and turns them into disciples for your product. Primal Branding gives you a method for doing so.

5) Don’t Call it That

By Eli Altman

Despite the focus on naming a company, Don’t Call it That alleviates a ton of the stress that comes with the ethereal aspects of building a brand.

Altman’s experience at A Hundred Monkeys, the naming agency responsible for Dolby Atmos, Target’s HeyDay brand, an hundreds more, shows through this guidebook/workbook combo as he takes you through a step-by-step process for naming a company.

The reason this book made the list is because brands don’t really exist until you can refer to them by name. Assigning a powerful moniker to your brand is one step down from the abstract ideation of a business.

As such, the first few chapters are all about strategizing the position of your company in the market and the importance of courage in building a brand. By the end, you’ll appreciate the branding process more and be liberated from the pressures that come with the territory of creating a brand name.

6) Zag

By Marty Neumeier

I won’t talk this book up too much, since Marty already got a shout from me at the beginning.

Bluntly, Zag is the workbook for implementing the theories laid out in the Brand Gap with an emphasis on brand differentiation.

If the Brand Gap is the “why,” Zag is the “how.”

7) Designing Brand Identity

By Alina Wheeler

Designing Brand Identity is the last book because it is a step-by-step walkthrough of every touchpoint affected by branding and how to make them work together.

When you are sick of reading about what branding is and ready to manifest the fleeting vision of your brand, this book will guide you through creating a tangible, real identity for your company. Visuals, verbiage, you name it, Wheeler’s got it.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

All of these books can be bought used or on Kindle for less than $300 total and it will save you an entire MBA tuition.

If branding feels more like a chink in your armor than a strength, these books will forge a new set of skills and knowledge that take your SaaS to the next level.

What did you think?

—Corey

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