Product Description

An exploration of strategic brand leadership uses hundreds of studies of leading firms, including General Electric, to show the strategic potential of brand management in a world-based economy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124752 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Amazon.com
Build it ... and they'll come. Nope, not necessarily, not anymore. It's a crowded, crazy market out there, and no matter how fabulous your product or service, there's bound to be someone else delivering something pretty close. The solution? Take your product or service and ... brand it! Though the idea has been around in management circles since the late 1980s, brand equity has never been more important than it is now. In Brand Leadership, David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler set out to guide managers to the next level of the brand revolution.

Building and managing brands, though obviously vital and necessary steps in the process, do not make up the whole picture of the successful development of a brand. What is needed is strategic brand leadership. Implementing this kind of leadership, Aaker and Joachimsthaler insist, requires a radical shift in an organization's culture, its structure, and its systems. In their densely packed but accessible book, they outline what this shift is all about, and discuss the important components of brand leadership: defining and elaborating a brand identity; designing the brand's architecture to achieve clarity, synergy, and leverage; building a brand beyond the obvious route of advertising by incorporating such aspects as sponsorship and the role of the Internet; and organizing the entire company around global brand leadership as opposed to merely the creation of a global brand. To support and demonstrate their ideas, the authors conducted hundreds of corporate case studies throughout Europe and the U.S. Inspiring and useful tales of such brand-focused and brand-recognized companies as Virgin, L.L. Bean, Nike, Adidas, and MasterCard are told in detail, and they touch on a host of other companies and brands to add texture to the lessons. As is obvious from these examples, achieving an effective brand leadership strategy requires awareness, understanding, passion, and a heck of a lot of work. But in today's enormously competitive brand environment, the rewards can be--and are--well worth the effort. Brand Leadership provides invaluable advice for anyone looking to focus and direct that effort toward a profitable and lasting result. --S. Ketchum

Review
Peter Sealey, Ph.D.Co-Director, Center for Marketing and Technology, University of California-Berkeley, former global marketing director, The Coca-Cola CompanyWhat Frederick W. Taylor did for scientific management and Peter F. Drucker did for the concept of management, Aaker has done for our understanding of brands. Now, in collaboration with Erich Joachimsthaler, he has taken that life's work to a new level of perception, insight, and sophistication. "Brand Leadership" is a highly needed roadmap for the multi-brand marketer which is as up-to-date as tomorrow morning with chapters on how to incorporate sponsorships and the Internet.

Book Info
Provides the brand management team with the capability to create and elaborate brand identities. A Powerful tool to harness subbrands and endorse brands to form brand architectures that create clarity and leverage assets, addressing the four imperatives of global brand management.

Customer Reviews

Marketing is Business Strategy in Action
In this third book in Aaker's branding trilogy the University of California professor and brand consultant documents a change away from the classic system of brand management that was created at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in the 1930's and subsequently spread to market-driven companies all over the world.

Aaker makes the case that classic brand management is being replaced by what he calls the brand leadership model. The manager in the brand leadership model emphasizes strategy as well as tactics, has a broader scope and is higher in the organization than the old-style brand manager. It focuses not only on short-term financials, but also on brand equity measures.

The authors say that this new approach results from the market complexities that have arisen out of competitive pressures channel dynamics, business environments with multiple brands, aggressive brand extensions and complex subbrand structures. This shift involves fundamental changes in organization structure, systems and culture as the authors demonstrate with case studies from companies like Polo Ralph Lauren, Virgin Airlines, Adidas, Marriott and McDonalds. These case studies make the book more readable and drive home the points that the authors make with their rigid system of definitions and processes.

Added bonuses are the chapters dealing with brand architecture, the role of sponsorship and the web, and building brands beyond advertising. Again, by using real world examples, the authors demonstrate how brand building today can benefit from many communications vehicles beyond traditional advertising so long as they make positive connections between the brand and consumers.

Brand Leadership is not a casual read, but it will reward the diligent reader with an understanding of how to deal with complex brand management issues and its linkage to business strategy. It will also help organizations that are not so market driven realize that marketing is really just the manifestation of solid business strategy.

Insightful!
David A. Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler flex their marketing muscles in this exhaustive treatise on global brand creation. But although the authors clearly know an enormous amount about building the perfect branding campaign, their book suffers from a patina of academia that makes it read like a textbook. The book has a multitude of marketing insights to offer and it cites plenty of real-life business examples, so we at getAbstract think you'll gain much by sticking with it if you are in marketing or public relations. But the next time the authors expound on their methods for making products memorable, accessible and likeable, we hope they spare a tender thought for their own worthy book.

Latest Aaker how-to manual hobbled by marketing-speak
Branding books from academics do the same sorts of things, but Aaker does them better than most. First, they define consumer needs and wants. Then they show how market segments are formed. Then they elaborate vast systems for categorizing brand traits to attack the segments. Aaker's latest effort -- a whopper at 350 pages of dense marketing jargon -- presents a system that is as good as any for ordering brand traits into sensible patterns that can be more easily manipulated. Kapferer's system is less exact, while Keller's is less up-to-date. Aaker takes a long , long time to say what he means on global branding --- namely that it's right for some but not right for others. His comments on Web branding are so incisive that a lot of Web-heads might wish they'd read this book two years ago. For a broad survey of contemporary branding in a readable style, check out the new Brands in the Balance from Kevin Drawbaugh. But if it's theory you want, you can't beat Aaker.