| Brand Leadership: Building
Assets in the Information Society
By David A. Aaker & Erich Joachimsthaler
Free Press, 352 pp.
Reviewed by David Reyes-Guerra
David Aaker is to branding what Alan Greenspan is to the economy,
what Henry Kissinger is to world diplomacy, what Emeril is to fine
cuisine. Well, maybe not quite as exciting as the latter two gentlemen,
but certainly more comprehensible than Our Lord of the Federal Reserve.
The fact is that Aaker is arguably the world's leading academic
on the subject of branding. The B.T. Grether Professor of Marketing
Strategy at the Haas School of Business, University of California,
Berkeley, and winner of the 1996 Paul D. Converse Award for outstanding
contributions to the development of the science of marketing, Aaker
has published more than 80 articles and 10 books. He is currently
vice chairman of Prophet Brand Strategy, a consulting firm with
offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Brand Leadership's co-author – Erich Joachimsthaler
– is CEO of The Brand Leadership Company and visiting professor
of business administration at the Darden School, University of Virginia.
This new book essentially extends the Aaker model, a unique brand-building
approach initially presented in Building Strong Brands, the
second of what now constitutes the Aaker trilogy (Managing Brand
Equity, Building Strong Brands, Brand Leadership). For anyone
with brand responsibility in any size organization, the Aaker model
of brand identity is the blueprint by which you can manage single
or multiple brands with a strategic business perspective.
David Aaker books are always presented as a mix of marketing theory
and actual branding case histories. This one begins with a clever
quote from Tom Peters – “It's a new brand world”
– as a way to introduce the new paradigm of brand leadership,
from classic/tactical to modern/strategic brand management. Chapters
2 and 3 recount and extend the brand identity and positioning model,
with support from examples such as Virgin Atlantic and L.L. Bean.
Brand architecture is presented in Chapters 4 and 5, with helpful
insights on how to understand brand relationships (sub-brands and
endorsed brands) and how to conduct a brand audit to define and
improve your organization's brand spectrum. Case histories from
General Electric, Marriott, Kraft, and Maxfli provide useful context.
Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 examine some unique brand-building programs
that go well beyond traditional advertising, profiling such marketers
as Nike, Adidas, Nestle, and BMW.
Finally, in Chapter 10, the authors describe a structural model
for organizations to create strong brands based on their study of
35 benchmark global firms. This can be a particularly helpful tool
for brand managers who need to articulate the strategic importance
and benefit of a well-supported branding/marketing function to senior
management.
Aaker and Joachimsthaler have written an eminently useful and provocative
treatise on what it takes to achieve brand leadership in today's
highly competitive business world. It should be required reading
for practitioners of brand management, corporate identity, or marketing.
|
