Branding Is Sex: Get Your Customers Laid and Sell the Hell Out of Anything
by Deb Gabor
Why You'll Love This
Most branding books put you to sleep — this one uses a single extended metaphor to make brand strategy genuinely impossible to forget.
- Great if you want: a fast, no-fluff framework for positioning any brand effectively
- The experience: short, punchy, and deliberately provocative — reads in one sitting
- The writing: Gabor leans hard into the conceit and never blinks — irreverent but substantive
- Skip if: crude humor wrapped around business advice isn't your thing
About This Book
Most businesses think branding is about logos, taglines, and color palettes. Deb Gabor thinks that's exactly why so many brands are dying slow, forgettable deaths. In Branding Is Sex, she makes a blunt, convincing case that great branding is fundamentally about desire — making customers feel like your brand gets them, completes them, and reflects who they want to be. The stakes are real: the brands that fail this test don't just lose market share, they fade into the same graveyard as Blockbuster and Circuit City. Gabor's framework pushes you to ask harder, more uncomfortable questions about who your brand is actually for and what emotional need it's genuinely fulfilling.
What makes this book worth your time isn't just the provocation in the title — it's that Gabor delivers a genuinely structured, actionable framework inside the irreverent packaging. The prose moves fast and punches hard, with zero tolerance for corporate fluff. At under 160 pages, it's built for traction, not shelf decoration. The provocative framing never feels like a gimmick because the thinking underneath it is surprisingly rigorous — blunt, specific, and refreshingly free of the vague inspiration that clutters most marketing books.