My desk has been home to a bumper crop of worthwhile new books on brands and branding for the past several months and in the spirit of spring cleaning it’s time to clear them off and make way for the next lot.

A standout in the group is Brand Aid by Brad VanAuken, which offers an almost encyclopedic look at every step in the brand process (designing, building, leveraging, managing). The advice is straightforward, voluminous and informed by experience. VanAuken also includes lengthy checklists at the end of each chapter that help readers assess their own situations and also serve as good platforms for brainstorming. Highly recommended.

Steve Yastrow’s Brand Harmony is a bit too heavy on the business-book epigrams in the beginning (“Your brand is not what you say you are. Your brand is what your customers think you are.”) but his insights quickly get more substantive after that. In addition to advocating the use of marketing research (never a bad idea) he also lays out a number of worthwhile exercises (which he calls Implementation Steps) designed to get marketers of all stripes to see the brand through the customer’s eyes and find ways to make sure the right messages are being communicated. Even if some of the Steps aren’t applicable to your situation, there are plenty of good ideas here to frame the process of analyzing a brand’s image and figuring out what to do if that image isn’t where you want it to be.

Each of the other three choices focuses on more specific brand-related issues. Brand Driven looks at the role of leadership, aiming its message at brand executives, human resources personnel and salespeople by raising key questions for each group at the end of each chapter. The authors have done themselves and their readers a bit of a disservice by choosing and rather inelegantly using a series of traveling and map metaphors to frame their discussion. But if, for example, you can look past the fact that the chapter on hiring and training brand-oriented employees is titled “Rev Your Engines,” and approach the book with a patient attitude, you will eventually find worthwhile information. Later chapters aimed at managers handling branding issues in health care, start-up, non-profit and M&A situations dispense with the clunky constructs and focus on communicating helpful advice.

Once you have a brand established, there are all sorts of bad people out there who want to use the Internet to cash in on it. In Defending the Brand , Brian Murray looks at the many ways a brand can come under attack online (digital piracy, fraud, spoof sites) and explains how companies can use the Web to fend off their attackers and monitor what’s being said and done in their brands’ names. He also explores how to manage online partner compliance, how to deal with online commentary sites, and how to use online intelligence tools to stay one step ahead of your competition.

Taking a brand worldwide is the subject of Sicco van Gelder’s Global Brand Strategy , in which he manages to make a seemingly impossible task more manageable, if no less difficult. He raises important questions and gives a framework for assessing brand affinity, brand reputation and local market conventions. And he offers advice on extending the brand and integrating (or “harmonizing”) it with other brands in the stable, after a brand has gone global. Van Gelder’s discussion of brand-building is thoughtful and wide-ranging, so even firms that aren’t ready to introduce a product internationally can benefit from his insights.

Brand Harmony (150 pages; $19.95), by Steve Yastrow, is published by SelectBooks, New York (www.selectbooks.com ).

Brand Driven (334 pages; $39.95), by F. Joseph LePla, Lynn Parker and Susan Davis, and Global Brand Strategy (260 pages; $39.95), by Sicco van Gelder, are published by Kogan Page, London (www.kogan-page.co.uk ) .

Defending the Brand (268 pages; $27.95), by Brian H. Murray, and Brand Aid (306 pages; $24.95), by Brad VanAuken, are published by AMACOM, New York (www.amacombooks.org ).