| Fusion Branding: How To Forge
Your Brand for the Future
By Nick Wreden
Accountability Press, 2002.
Reviewed by Bonnie Briggs
In the world of brand development or “branding,” advice
is everywhere you look. Good advice is rare. Nick Wreden’s
book, a must-read for marketers, counters the conventional wisdom
that emphasizes spending on mass media. Not the right strategy,
according to Wreden, when consumers and communication technologies
have changed the rules of the game. We’re entering the customer
economy now, he says, “and the demand economy is just over
the horizon.”
Wreden dissects the not-so-effective branding goals established
over the past 50 years and still maintained by many firms—buyers
of advertising, as well as creators. He doesn’t completely
discount advertising as a brand-building tool; instead, he examines
the “vague goal” of awareness of and focus on positioning,
which emphasizes competition rather than differentiation as defined
by, and delivered to, the customer.
Wreden challenges the reader to understand the role of the brand
from the customer’s point of view; as a matter of fact, instead
of brand equity, he prefers the phrase customer equity.
He describes customer equity as “the value a customer brings
to an organization in terms of sales, profits and intangibles, like
referral sales, over the lifetime of a relationship.”
This book is ambitious, covering a lot of ground—from the
basis for current thinking on branding to everyday operational excellence
(“...the goal is effectiveness, not efficiency”). And
finally, an excellent chapter on change management that begins with
this definition: “Change management is vision with a deadline.”
The complex world of brands is best understood by considering the
factors that influence their success. However, the balance between
continuity of purpose (knowing why the brand exists and maintaining
a consistent focus) and adapting to changing market needs will be
the subject of increased reevaluation for several years to come.
Clearly, what was the status quo for decades is now a twenty-first-century
“work in progress.” My advice? Keep reading. This book—and
others that have been thoughtfully referenced in each of Wreden’s
chapters—contain important insights on exactly how much is
changing in the world of branding—or rather, how much needs
to change, and what companies now need to do to keep their brands
alive.
Bonnie Briggs is the manager of brand identity
and communications at Caterpillar.
This review originally appeared in the Summer
2003 Design Management Review
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