The story of six famous entrepreneurs and how they used branding to make their products successful. It serves to illustrate the evolution of the concept of branding (though the earlier people on this list did not call it that) and why it is so critical to a successful business. Brand is a label for the trust a company and it's products build with customers over time.

Wedgewood was a china manufacturer in the late 1700s. He took advantage of changes in the early industrial revolution to market earthware that looked and felt more like china to a growing middle class. He introduced showrooms, commission-based sales, timecards, and a number of other innovations which went on to become staples of modern business.

Heinz was a bottler of foods in the late 1800s. Bottled foods had been sold by traveling merchants historically, but people were rightly distrustful of their contents. Because the merchants had no brand to maintain, they could and did sell poor-quality goods. Heinz spent decades building a reputation for impeccable quality, allowing him to take advantage of the blossoming rail network to sell his products nationwide. This was a dramatic breakthrough: people purchasing food products from a company in another state whose staff or facilities they had never seen. The power of brand made this possible.

Marshall Field started what became known as a department store in the late 1800s. He took advantages of the growing wealth of the middle class to offer luxury goods previously only accessible to the wealthy. He built a brand on elegance, refinement, and class. He introduced concepts such as female sales staff (somehow he was the first person to realize that women did most of the shopping, and that they'd be more comfortable being waited on by their own sex) and no-hassle return policies. He made a policy that a customer making a return should be treated exactly as if they were making a purchase, which was a radical idea at the time.

The modern entrepreneurs described (Estee Lauder, Howard Schultz of Starbucks Coffee, and Michael Dell of Dell Computer) were less interesting, but the same lessons punched through. For example, Starbucks took advantage of the growing desire for people to enjoy small luxuries on a daily basis, rather than saving up for one big splurge, like a vacation. With gourmet coffee as ubiquitous as it is now, it's hard to believe (or remember) that just a decade or two ago, most coffee sold and drunk was Maxwell House, large cans from the supermarket.

Brand is how you communication with your customers and how you differentiate your business from competitors and avoid price wars. This book shows that well through historical example.