Great Ikea! A Brand for all the People by Elen Lewis 
Wizard! Harry Potter's Brand Magic by Stephen Brown
Search Me: the Surprising Success of Google by Neil Taylor
Guinness is Guinness by Mark Griffiths
Brand It Like Beckham by Andy Milligan
Brand America by Simon Anholt
My Sister's A Barista by John Simmons
All Day I Dream About Sport by Conrad Brunner
Winning Together by John & Matt Simmons

UK & European users

Business publisher Cyan first launched its Great Brand Stories series in 2004. It's a collection of attractively produced, low priced pocket paperbacks each of which analyses the history and development of a major global brand. Cyan has its sights set firmly on mainstream consumer buyers, and as a result the choice of brands covered is pleasantly populist, sometimes even a little eccentric. Many of the usual suspects are present here, including Google, Adidas, Ikea, Guinness and Starbucks. But the series also includes studies of wider cultural icons such as David Beckham, "Brand America", and the Harry Potter phenomenon. New titles for 2006 will include books about Dyson, Arsenal football club, Banyan Tree holiday resorts and the Scotch whisky business. 

Supervised by series editor John Simmons, each book provides a chatty but thorough analysis of its target brand's past and present, offers thoughts on the reasons for its success, and suggests some lessons that can be learned and applied elsewhere. On the down side, some of the books occasionally feel a little padded out with light-hearted banter. The Harry Potter study, in particular, strays frequently into whimsy, to the extent that one whole chapter is printed only in reverse mirror text. Expanding analysis of a single brand over a whole 180 pages is obviously a bit of a stretch, but at this price (£7.99/$12.95) it's hard to complain, and most of the books make up for chatty digressions with some solid analysis. More illustration would also be welcome. But this is an intriguing series, nicely packaged and presented, and good for supplying a thorough grounding on many of the key icons of the modern age. 

Added 19th January 2006