Brand Portfolio Strategy

In this long-awaited book from the world’s premier brand expert and author of the seminal work Building Strong Brands, David Aaker shows managers how to construct a brand portfolio strategy that will support a company’s business strategy and create relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity. Building on case studies of world-class brands such as Dell, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Dove, Intel, CitiGroup, and PowerBar, Aaker demonstrates how powerful, cohesive brand strategies have enabled managers to revitalize brands, support business growth, and create discipline in confused, bloated portfolios of master brands, subbrands, endorser brands, cobrands, and brand extensions. Renowned brand guru Aaker demonstrates that assuring that each brand in the portfolio has a clear role and actively reinforces and supports the other portfolio brands will profoundly affect the firm’s profitability. Brand Portfolio Strategy is required reading not only for brand managers but for all managers with bottom-line responsibility to their shareholders.

"Beloved Brands is a book every CMO or would-be CMO should read." Al Ries With Beloved Brands, you will learn everything you need to know so you can build a brand that your consumers will love. You will learn how to think strategically, define your brand with a positioning statement and a brand idea, write a brand plan everyone can follow, inspire smart and creative marketing execution, and be able to analyze the performance of your brand through a deep-dive business review. Marketing pros and entrepreneurs, this book is for you. Whether you are a VP, CMO, director, brand manager or just starting your marketing career, I promise you will learn how to realize your full potential. You could be in brand management working for an organization or an owner-operator managing a branded business. Beloved Brands provides a toolbox intended to help you every day in your job. Keep it on your desk and refer to it whenever you need to write a brand plan, create a brand idea, develop a creative brief, make advertising decisions or lead a deep-dive business review. You can even pass on the tools to your team, so they can learn how to deliver the fundamentals needed for your brands. This book is also an excellent resource for marketing professors, who can use it as an in-class textbook to develop future marketers. It will challenge communications agency professionals, who are looking to get better at managing brands, including those who work in advertising, public relations, in-store marketing, digital advertising or event marketing. "Most books on branding are really for the MARCOM crowd. They sound good, but you find it's all fluff when you try to take it from words to actions. THIS BOOK IS DIFFERENT! Graham does a wonderful job laying out the steps in clear language and goes beyond advertising and social media to show how branding relates to all aspects of GENERAL as well as marketing management. Make no mistake: there is a strong theoretical foundation for all he says...but he spares you the buzzwords. Next year my students will all be using this book." Kenneth B. (Ken) Wong, Queen's University If you are an entrepreneur who has a great product and wants to turn it into a brand, you can use this book as a playbook. These tips will help you take full advantage of branding and marketing, and make your brand more powerful and more profitable. You will learn how to think, define, plan, execute and analyze, and I provide every tool you will ever need to run your brand. You will find models and examples for each of the four strategic thinking methods, looking at core strength, competitive, consumer and situational strategies. To define the brand, I will provide a tool for writing a brand positioning statement as well as a consumer profile and a consumer benefits ladder. I have created lists of potential functional and emotional benefits to kickstart your thinking on brand positioning. We explore the step-by-step process to come up with your brand idea and bring it all together with a tool for writing the ideal brand concept. For brand plans, I provide formats for a long-range brand strategy roadmap and the annual brand plan with definitions for each planning element. From there, I show how to build a brand execution plan that includes the creative brief, innovation process, and sales plan. I provide tools for how to create a brand calendar and specific project plans. To grow your brand, I show how to make smart decisions on execution around creative advertising and media choices. When it comes time for the analytics, I provide all the tools you need to write a deep-dive business review, looking at the marketplace, consumer, channels, competitors and the brand. Write everything so that it is easy to follow and implement for your brand. My promise to help make you smarter so you can realize your full potential.

Steenkamp introduces the global brand value chain and explains how brand equity factors into shareholder value. The book equips executives with techniques for developing strategy, organizing execution, and measuring results so that your brand will prosper globally. What sets strong global brands apart? First, they generate more than half their revenue and most of their growth outside their home market. Secondly, their brand equity is responsible for a massive percentage of their firm’s market value. Third, they operate as single brands everywhere on the planet. We find them in B2C and B2B industries, among large and small companies, and among established companies and new businesses. The stewards of these brands have a set of skills and knowledge that sets them apart from the typical corporate marketer. So what’s their secret? In a world that is globalizing, but not yet globalized, how do you build a powerful global brand that resonates universally but also accommodates local nuances? How do you ensure that it is dynamic and flexible enough to change at market speed? World-class marketing expert Jan-Benedict Steenkamp has studied global brands for over 25 years on six continents. He has distilled their practices into eight tools that you can start using today. With case studies from around the world, Steenkamp’s book is provocative and timely. Global Brand Strategy speaks to three types of B2C and B2B managers: those who want to strengthen already strong global brands, those who want to launch their brands globally and get results, and those who need to revive their global brand and stop the bleeding.

An expert presents in a compact form the 20 essential principles of branding that will lead to the creation of strong brands.

Written by experts on global marketing, Contemporary Brand Management focuses on the essentials of Brand Management in today’s global marketplace. The text succinctly covers a natural sequence of branding topics, from the building of a new brand, to brand extension and the creation of a global brand, to the management of a firm’s brand portfolio. The authors uniquely explore global branding as a natural expansion strategy across markets and offer numerous international brands as examples throughout. Designed for shorter strategic branding courses (half-term or 6 weeks in length), this text is the ideal companion for upper-level, graduate, or executive-level students seeking a practical knowledge of brand management concepts and applications.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: 1,0, Aachen University of Applied Sciences, 65 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This paper argues that brand portfolio management is an inevitable discipline in marketing and has to be applied in the business practice. It presents the current literature about this topic, beginning with the general branding theories, covering basics and first approaches to brand portfolio management, and also takes the international focus on brand portfolio management. It shows a case-study of the fast moving consumer goods producer Unilever. Its "Path to Growth" strategy, where Unilever went through the biggest restructuring efforts in its history, is presented and analysed. The Unilever "Path to Growth" strategy, was a five year restructuring plan launched in 1999, in which Unilever sold an disinvested many established and smaller brands, cut substantial amounts of costs, laid off thousands of employees and restructured their brand portfolio considerably. The weaknesses and the benefits of "Path to Growth" are shown, and also brand portfolio management in general is described in this context. The Unilever case is analysed in detail. The motivations for brand portfolio management in general, and the specific restructuring campaign are shown and explained. Financial and qualitative analysis is taken. The outcome of the restructurings is evaluated and conclusions are taken. Recommendations for further studies are made and an outlook is given.

Globalization has expanded the options for building brand strategies through social media, the internet, and in conventional approaches. Amidst increasing market competition, companies need to analyze their competitive choices to determine their brand equity in the marketplace. As such, it is necessary for companies to develop customer-focused brands to gain competitive advantage. This book enhances knowledge on developing competitive brands in emerging markets, particularly the BRICS countries. It provides the necessary guidance with proven strategies for building successful brands, the decisions and options faced by brand managers, and the tools to manage brands effectively. It develops new dimensions on brand management strategies by analyzing best practices based on proven strategies. Readers will not only gain insight into international brand competition, but also into the organizational support necessary to build and manage a powerful brand. It is a necessary read for all MBA students and scholars in marketing, especially those who seek to gain new insight in the rapidly changing global marketplace.

Management fads come and go in the blink of an eye, but branding is here to stay. Closely watched by the stock market and obsessed over by the biggest companies, brand identity is the one indisputable source of sustainable competitive advantage, the vital key to customer loyalty. David Aaker is widely recognised as the leading expert in this burgeoning field. Now he prepares managers for the next wave of the brand revolution. With coauthor Erich Joachimsthaler, Aaker takes brand management to the next level - strategic brand leadership. Required reading for every marketing manager is the authors' conceptualisation of 'brand architecture' - how multiple brands relate to each other - and their insights on the hot new area of Internet branding. Full of impeccable, intelligent guidance, BRAND LEADERSHIP is the visionary key to business success in the future.