Building Strong Brands

Description

As industries turn increasingly hostile, it is clear that strong brand-building skills are needed to survive and prosper. In David Aaker's pathbreaking book, MANAGING BRAND EQUITY, managers discovered the value of a brand as a strategic asset and a company's primary source of competitive advantage. Now, in this compelling new work, Aaker uses real brand-building cases from Saturn, General Electric, Kodak, Healthy Choice, McDonald's, and others to demonstrate how strong brands have been created and managed. A common pitfall of brand strategists is to focus on brand attributes. Aaker shows how to break out of the box by considering emotional and self-expressive benefits and by introducing the brand-as-person, brand-as-organisation, and brand-as-symbol perspectives. A second pitfall is to ignore the fact that individual brands are part of a larger system consisting of many intertwined and overlapping brands and subbrands. Aaker shows how to manage the "brand system" to achieve clarity and synergy, to adapt to a changing environment, and to leverage brand assets into new markets and products. As executives in a wide range of industries seek to prevent their products and services from becoming commodities, they are recommitting themselves to brands as a foundation of business strategy. This new work will be essential reading for the battle-ready.

David A. Aaker is the E.T. Grether Professor of Marketing Strategy at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a consultant to dozens of companies, including AT&T, Coca Cola, MasterCard, and General Motors. He is the cofounder, with Erich Joachimsthaler of the firm Aaker-Joachimsthaler Prophet Brand Strategy. His previous books include BRAND LEADERSHIP and MANAGING BRAND EQUITY, both published by The Free Press. Erich Joachimsthaler is the founder and CEO of Vivaldi Partners, a strategy, innovation, and marketing consulting company. He has published around 60 articles in academic journals centered on marketing issues. His most recent book focuses on the broadening strategic role of marketing in building growth businesses and is entitled: Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute Your Company's Next Growth Strategy