A brand strategist's account of the Dyson phenomenon, published in 2006 as part of the Great Brand Stories series. Carruthers is usefully sceptical about the company's own origin myth — he points out that vacuum cleaners were not the technological desert the Dyson story implies — and focuses on how Dyson built its mythology as deliberately as it built its machines.
This is the one substantial book about Dyson written by somebody other than Dyson, and its value is precisely that distance. Carruthers sees the brand construction that Dyson's own books take for granted: the mythologising of the 5,127 prototypes, the single-message advertising discipline, the choice to front the campaign himself. A founder reading it gets the Dyson story as a case study in narrative control — how a story is told is part of the product. Carruthers also does what no insider account can: he questions which parts are true and which are the story the company needed to tell.