Mark Kingsley is a creative director and strategist with a wide range of experience and recognition. He is a faculty member in the School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding program and currently holds the endowed Melbert B. Cary Professorship in Graphic Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. As Executive Strategy Director at Collins, he developed the new global positioning for Ogilvy and helped Equinox enter the luxury hotel business. For over 17 years, his studio Greenberg Kingsley specialized in music and arts, including several years of branding and advertising for Central Park SummerStage; work for the Guggenheim Museum store; and music packaging for John Coltrane, Pat Metheny, and Quincy Jones. His current studio, Malcontent, serves global advertising firms, fin-tech startups, arts organizations, living legends, and Pulitzer Prize winners.
Mark Kingsley approaches branding with exactly the right balance of wisdom, skepticism, and humor, giving it exactly the kind of tough love the subject so richly deserves.--Michael Bierut; Partner at Pentagram, critic at the Yale School of Art, lecturer at the Yale School of Management In Universal Principles of Branding, author Mark Kingsley deftly deconstructs the discipline of branding with intelligence, candor and a much-needed, remarkably original voice. In doing so, Kingsley has accomplished the impossible: he has created a book that finally--at long last--provides a confident, crystal clear, no-holes barred overview of what it really takes to create, define, build and deliver a brand.--Debbie Millman, host of Design Matters and Chair of the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts Quoting a slew of unusual suspects through a myriad of lenses, Kingsley dismantles and reframes the basic tenets of branding to promote a more robust, critical, and introspective understanding of it. With so many step-by-step books on branding, this book offers a unique point of view that places it as an intrinsic aspect of human behavior.--Armin Vit, Co-Founder of UnderConsideration and Editor of Brand New