Book excerpt: "Carrying through Alina Wheeler's trademark of beautiful layout and design, the book takes you on a journey through just about every important element of branding you could think of, from passion to positioning." —The Influential Marketing Blog (May 2011) A company's brand is its most valuable asset. Wheeler takes the most seminal tools used by a wide variety of thought leaders and practitioners and makes the information understandable, visible, relevant, exportable and applicable. With her best-selling debut book, Designing Brand Identity (Wall Street Journal, Best-Seller, Spotlight 1/23/2011), now in its third edition, Alina Wheeler reinvented the marketing textbook using a straightforward style to help demystify the branding process. This new offering from Wheeler, Brand Atlas, builds on this user-friendly approach to aggregate and simplify the science behind branding with a unique visual teaching method suited for time-crunched professionals. Brand Atlas follows the recent YouTube-iPhone-Pecha Kucha era trend toward fast-paced visual instruction by neglecting needless jargon and combining vivid, full-color images and easy-to-follow diagrams to break down branding principles into basic step-by-step concepts that can be immediately applied. This handy reference: Speaks to a broad range of stakeholders in the branding process—from CEOs to designers to brand managers Provides tools to integrate brand throughout the entire customer experience, build relationships based on brand, measure a brand's value, and define a brand strategy Contains essential information illustrated through the use of diagrams With diagrams designed by Joel Katz, an internationally known information designer and a global authority on the visualization of complex information, Brand Atlas is a compact, no-nonsense guide that shows how tactical innovation in the design process is crucial to building brand assets.