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Building Strong Brands
By David A. Aaker
Free Press, 380 pp.
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-organization, and brand-as-symbol perspectives. The twin
concepts of brand identity (the brand image that brand strategists
aspire to create or maintain) and brand position (that part of the
brand identity that is to be actively communicated) play a key role
in managing the "out-of-the-box" brand.
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.
Aaker also addresses practical management issues, introducing a
set of brand equity measures, termed the brand equity ten, to help
those who measure and track brand equity across products and markets.
He presents and analyzes brand-nurturing organizational forms that
are responsive to the challenges of coordinated brands across markets,
products, roles, and contexts. Potentially destructive organizational
pressures to change a brand's identity and position are also discussed.
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.
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