Bestselling authors Al and Laura Ries return with a unique look at the process of brand building. They show how successful new brands have been created in the past, and go on to demonstrate how today's new brands and categories - be they products or services - can be most effectively developed from existing products. Using insightful studies of failed convergence products and engaging success stories of products that have achieved worldwide success through divergence, the Rieses - in their trademarked witty style - have written the definitive book on branding.

What Charles Darwin did for biology,
Al and Laura Ries do for branding.

In their exciting new book, The Origin of Brands, the Rieses take Darwin's revolutionary idea of evolution and apply it to the branding process. What results is a new and strikingly effective strategy for creating innovative products, building a successful brand, and, in turn, achieving business success. Here, the Rieses explain how changing conditions in the marketplace create endless opportunities to build new brands and accumulate riches. But these opportunities cannot be found where most people and most companies look. That is, in the convergence of existing categories like television and the computer, the cellphone and the Internet.

Instead, opportunity lies in the opposite direction -- in divergence. By following Darwin's brilliant deduction that new species arise from divergence of an existing species, the Rieses outline an effective strategy for creating and taking to market an effective brand. In The Origin of Brands, you will learn how to:

• Divide and conquer
• Exploit divergence
• Use the theories of survival of the firstest and survival of the secondest
• Harness the power of pruning