Devotion. A truly successful brand has devotees. They proselytise, generating greater momentum in their brand. Occasionally, the most impactful ones "seize the generic" and become the category-moniker – like Hoover did, once upon a time.

Some remarkable brands with devotees include the Faiths, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Apple, Netflix, Ford and Singapore Airways. Newer ones grow in our midst today, like ChatGPT, Airbnb, TikTok and Spotify. Brands are signposts in our culture. They’re short-hands for a collection of values and meanings, to which people are attracted and become loyal, or choose to bypass.

Building a brand takes a huge investment of funds, time and creativity. Plus an inexorable commitment to staying in tune, tweaking values to contemporary mores while staying faithful to a core set of beliefs. One easily stumbles. Nike recently abandoned "brand equity investment", communicating a brand’s values, instead turning only to performance marketing, measuring the transactions that flow from specific investments. It faltered, figuratively falling to its knees, resulting in a change of leadership and a return to understanding that people need to "believe first" to "just do it".

Brands amplify business. They elevate a product beyond its material performance, to something consumers bond with and are prepared to pay more for than its competitors. Brands help things to sell better.

There’s a well-travelled path in building a brand. Arrest attention. Encourage trial. Build regular purchases. Secure loyalty. Reward advocacy and recruitment. The Theory of Social Exchange says we stay in relationships so long as we get out at least as much as we put into them. It is the same with brands. If we’re rewarded for our spend with decent performance and a certain "glow", we remain. It’s like most relationships – we evaluate their worth as we go along. People change jobs when this balance is wrong, spouses leave each other, one moves house, doesn’t get another pet, no longer buys Colgate, and switches to Guinness from Stella. Or reads Ziyad Marar, not Stephen Pinker.

So, what about books? Well, from a brand perspective, they’re more like "one night stands" than long-term relationships. Unless you’re a successful author with a reputation, you’re selling a one-off interaction with a title. It’s more than a dalliance, as a book is normally a well-considered purchase, not something impulsive. Some authors’ brands prompt consistent expectations, like Wilbur Smith for racy "masculine energy"; Enid Blyton for children’s moral tales; James A Michener for fictional, well-researched deep-dives; Peter James for clever whodunnits… these are the exceptions, not the rule.

If we want devotion, we need to devote more resource to building publisher and author brands in a more B2C, and indeed D2C, world

Largely, publishers’ brands play a greater role in a B2B relationship with authors. As a reader, do I know what a Hachette book promises me? I think a Mills & Boon is going to be softly romantic. I believe Pelican stands for high-quality non-fiction. DK books are heavily illustrated, well-designed, subject-informative pieces. Oxford University Press gives me a well-researched, well-written, academic treatment of a subject. Virago shares pioneering feminism. Barefoot gives us visually captivating books that stir children’s imaginations. Not many publishers have brands that connote clear propositions to readers who buy books. Yet we have thousands of publisher brands and ever more imprints…

I’ve worked with businesses to build all sorts of brands, in toiletries, confectionery, telecommunications, automotive, beverages, technology... the recurring truth is that successful brands have powers of seduction and persuasion. We respond to them with feelings (our implicit system of figuring out our relationships, rarely articulated) and our thoughts (our explicit system of explaining why we believe and do things). Devotees feel and think they’re right with their brand choices.

Books’ seduction comes, very largely, from their cover. That single asset does so much work. It tries to arrest attention, encourage trial and communicate what’s in it for the reader. Publishers’ marketing teams have one of the hardest jobs I’ve seen. With a massive overload of products to bring to the buyer’s attention, they imaginatively seduce the distracted book-buyer to pay attention to a complex product through a tiny aperture in their perception, then persuade them to follow with a purchase.

Books’ persuasion comes from social approbation, reviews, author salience and the supporting evidence of word-of-mouth recommendations. I’ve noticed so much of the industry’s efforts focused on persuasion, yet my experience tells me that without seduction, persuasion is usually a seed that won’t germinate.

So, what to do about brands in publishing? For many years, I worked with Unilever. They had about 2,000 brands (think houses and imprints) and strategically reduced them to 400, making only about 20 "pillar brands" on which to build their business. Publishing might also have to invest in its houses becoming core, communicative brands that bring meaning to their authors’ books. Those clearly defined propositions will help readers to navigate discovery.

Seduction has many forms, such as advertising, placement, producing content that carries on from the book and grows the experience for the reader (eg podcast, Substack, Personify, Story Rabbit). They can follow through with persuasive content such as sales-oriented book descriptions, niche targeting, building communities around tightly defined values to match with books, identifying current and emerging trends, dynamically and automatically updating metadata. All of these things are hugely more affordable and available through contemporary technology, including AI.

If we want devotion, we need to devote more resource to building publisher and author brands in a more B2C, and indeed D2C, world. Stronger brands will strengthen books sales.