For The Brand

Folks all over West Texas and eastern New Mexico will tell you: Cowdens have been ranching here for as long as anyone can remember. The Cowdens, in fact, have been at the forefront of the cattle business for 150 years. Arriving in Texas in the 1850s, Cowden men and women raised and trailed cattle, sought out water and better grazing land, tangled with Comanches—and helped extend the western line of Anglo settlement as they raised their families. They eventually moved to New Mexico, where they established the renowned JAL Ranch. Award-winning writer Michael Pettit, a Cowden descendant and former rancher, offers a compelling portrait of this genuine American ranching family. Riding for the Brand spans six generations and two states to serve up a real slice of the Old West, complete with cowboys and Indians, cattle and buffalo, open range and barbed wire. Pettit skillfully blends family saga with an urbanite’s firsthand look at life on today’s 50,000-acre Cowden Ranch, where the one dependable factor is the constant wind. Riding for the Brand traces the evolution of the Texas and New Mexico cattle business from the era of intimate ranching communities to today’s oil-enriched or corporate operations. But it’s also the story of one man’s search for identity through his connections to a family, a place, and a way of life.

Praise for 60-Minute Brand Strategist "A fresh take on the wisdom of putting brand strategy at the heart of corporate strategy. Brilliant insights for a fast-moving world." —Angela Ahrendts, CEO, Burberry "Idris Mootee paints a sharp, comprehensive, and finely articulated analysis of the potential of meaningful brands in the 21st century's cultural scenario and business landscape. The result is a smart manual that reminds you and your company how to build relevant, authentic, sustainable, and successful brands in an evolving society." —Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer, PepsiCo Inc. "Idris's book teaches us how to engage today's increasingly cynical consumers on a deeper emotional level to build real equity and leadership. He demonstrates how to break out of the box and connect business strategy to brand strategy, and how the right brand story never really ends!" —Blair Christie, SVP and CMO, Cisco Systems, Inc. "It's rare to find a book that's both inspiring and practical but Idris nailed it! He has crafted the ultimate guide to brand building in the connected world with visual clarity and thought-provoking strategy." —Eric Ryan, cofounder, Method Products, Inc. This book is about one thing only: branding. Period. In this economy ruled by ideas, the only sustainable form of leadership is brand leadership. 60-Minute Brand Strategist offers a fast-paced, field-tested view of how branding decisions happen in the context of business strategy, not just in marketing communications. With a combi-nation of perspectives from business strategy, customer experience, and even anthropology, this new and updated edition outlines the challenges traditional branding faces in a hyper-connected world. This essential handbook of brand marketing offers an encyclopedia of do's and don'ts, including new case studies of how these concepts are being used by the world's most successful and valuable brands. 60-Minute Brand Strategist is your battle plan, filled with powerful branding tools and techniques to win your customers' hearts and defeat the competition.

Riding for the Brand is a western that's set in the future. It's a short novel about leadership, human motivation and change. The story revolves around two men: Bob Fooshee, a freelance writer, and Burns Marcus, a rancher who builds a business empire. The year is 2030, and Fooshee is dispatched by a magazine to write about Marcus, whose ranch was near bankruptcy 25 years earlier. It was then that Marcus, searching for answers, attended the cattlemen's convention in San Antonio and heard a speaker who provoked him to radically change the way he approached his business. This was the catalyst that led Marcus to start Diamond Enterprises, which becomes the model organization of the 21st century. While interviewing Burns at his ranch in Oklahoma, Bob rides pasture, ropes a few steers and discovers the key to Burns Marcus' success - the power of purposeful leadership.

Book of Branding is an essential addition to the start-up toolkit, designed for entrepreneurs, founders, visual designers, brand creators and anyone seeking to decode the complicated world of brand identity. The conversational, jargon free, tone of the book helps the reader to understand essential elements of the brand identity process. Offering first hand experience, insights and tips throughout, the book uses real life case studies to show how great collaborative work can be achieved. Book of Branding is a creative guide for new businesses, start-ups and individuals, which puts visual identity at the heart of brand strategy.

Danny Fultz rode into the country of the Big Cypress looking for a meal and honest work on a ranch if there was any to be had. He found both with the Cracker cowboys of the Big Cypress Cattle Company at a time when it and two other of the large south Florida ranches were on the verge of war over missing stock and each accusing the other of rustling. Danny wasn’t looking for trouble, but his unwanted reputation as a gunfighter and former lawman caught up to him and pinned a target on him for the real rustlers behind the rancher’s problems. After being shot out of the saddle hunting stray calves, Danny developed a personal interest in investigating the mystery of the disappearing cattle. Meanwhile he finds himself falling in love with the lovely Josephine, the adopted daughter of the aging owner of the B3C ranch all the while knowing that her heart is set on another. With help from an assortment of colorful characters found on the Florida frontier, Danny uncovers far more than he could ever have suspected and that information sets into motion a series of deadly events. Can he keep the range from erupting in gunfire and get the girl while being hunted and harassed by a stranger with killing on his mind?

Interwoven with this collection of short stories about participating in Cowboy Action Shooting competitions are Biblical themes that bring honor to God and his word. (Practical Life)

The open West was a land where wanderers could find themselves a home—one to fight for, be changed by, sometimes to die for. Jed Asbury was one such journeyman, taking on the identity of a dead person. Allen Ring was another: He’d won his plot of land in a card game only to find he had to win again with a gun. From a has-been boxer to a ranch hand taking on his bosses’ troubles, the characters in these classic Louis L’Amour short stories are all “riding for the brand”—staying loyal to what matters, staking the West with their courage and their blood.

Written by John Lidstone and Janice MacLennan, the second edition of Marketing Planning for the Pharmaceutical Industry became accepted as the bible for the industry. In this new companion book Janice MacLennan picks up two of the themes touched on in Marketing Planning - market segmentation and branding, and the inter-relationship between these two - and with this book makes them key topics for discussion. Brand Planning for the Pharmaceutical Industry begins by exploring what branding is and why it is of importance, particularly to the pharmaceutical sector. The book then goes on to show how branding can be integrated into the early stages of the commercialization process for new products, both in theory and in the 'real' world. The book provides a step-by-step guide to brand planning, using market segmentation as the starting point. The book is split into two parts, the first dealing comprehensively with brand planning for products yet to get to the market, with the second part applying the same process to products that are already on the market. Both parts are extremely pragmatic, full of pertinent examples and insights from the pharmaceutical industry, and are directly applicable to your own brand planning. Brand Planning for the Pharmaceutical Industry concludes by confronting the problems that organizations are likely to have in actually making brand planning an integral part of their work and presents strategies for dealing with them.