The best books on creating brands that people love and want to pay for

I’m so excited that Shepherd.com invited me to share ​my top 5 books for creating brands that people love and want to pay for​! As anyone who knows me understands, I love books! And I especially love books that talk about brand strategy, brand expansion and licensing, since these are the areas I focus on in my own work, and also happen to fire up my own passion. I am always on the lookout for great books that discuss how these concepts are interconnected, and Anne H. Chasser and Jennifer C. Wolfe’s Brand Rewired is one of those books.

I loved that the book illustrates how integrating intellectual property into brand development can help make brands better and more desirable. As someone deeply involved in brand licensing, I found this book to be a refreshing resource in a world of stodgy technical books on the subject. The world is surrounded by licensed products, and Brand Rewired helps to illustrate why that happens to be the case.

The other books I share include:

• The Human Brand – Chris Malone, Susan T. Fiske
• The Breakaway Brand – Francis Kelly, Barry Silverstein
• Hooked – Nir Eyal
• Brand Sense – Martin Lindstrom

In my book, ​Expand, Grow, Thrive​, I share examples of top-flight marketers who have extended and expanded their brands, as well as challenges they have had to overcome along the way. I also share the ​LASSO model​ (Lateral, Addictive, Storied, Scalable, Ownable) I co-created with Mark Di Somma for marketers to use to get their heads around the desired attributes of highly successful brands and their expansion programs. By sharing advice, anecdotes and tips from household names like my former employer, Coca-Cola, and Disney, I’ve created a framework to help brands expand, grow and then ultimately thrive.