Driving Brand Value

As products, pricing and distribution fast become commodities, companies are discovering that managing brand relationships is the most effective way to increase brand equity.

The most important assets of any business are intangible: its company name, brands, symbols, and slogans, and their underlying associations, perceived quality, name awareness, customer base, and proprietary resources such as patents, trademarks, and channel relationships. These assets, which comprise brand equity, are a primary source of competitive advantage and future earnings, contends David Aaker, a national authority on branding. Yet, research shows that managers cannot identify with confidence their brand associations, levels of consumer awareness, or degree of customer loyalty. Moreover in the last decade, managers desperate for short-term financial results have often unwittingly damaged their brands through price promotions and unwise brand extensions, causing irreversible deterioration of the value of the brand name. Although several companies, such as Canada Dry and Colgate-Palmolive, have recently created an equity management position to be guardian of the value of brand names, far too few managers, Aaker concludes, really understand the concept of brand equity and how it must be implemented. In a fascinating and insightful examination of the phenomenon of brand equity, Aaker provides a clear and well-defined structure of the relationship between a brand and its symbol and slogan, as well as each of the five underlying assets, which will clarify for managers exactly how brand equity does contribute value. The author opens each chapter with a historical analysis of either the success or failure of a particular company's attempt at building brand equity: the fascinating Ivory soap story; the transformation of Datsun to Nissan; the decline of Schlitz beer; the making of the Ford Taurus; and others. Finally, citing examples from many other companies, Aaker shows how to avoid the temptation to place short-term performance before the health of the brand and, instead, to manage brands strategically by creating, developing, and exploiting each of the five assets in turn

In their efforts to become more customer-focused, companies everywhere find themselves entangled in outmoded systems, metrics, and strategies rooted in their product-centered view of the world. Now, to ease this shift to a customer focus, marketing strategy experts Roland T. Rust, Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Katherine N. Lemon have created a dynamic new model they call "Customer Equity," a strategic framework designed to maximize every firm's most important asset, the total lifetime value of its customer base. The authors' Customer Equity Framework yields powerful insights that will help any business increase the value of its customer base. Rust, Zeithaml, and Lemon introduce the three drivers of customer equity -- Value Equity, Brand Equity, and Retention Equity -- and explain in clear, nontechnical language how managers can base their strategies on one or a combination of these drivers. The authors demonstrate in this breakthrough book how managers can build and employ competitive metrics that reveal their company's Customer Equity relative to their competitors. Based on these metrics, they show how managers can determine which drivers are most important in their industry, how they can make efficient strategic trade-offs between expenditures on these drivers, and how to project a financial return from these expenditures. The final section devotes two chapters to the Customer Pyramid, an approach that segments customers based on their long-term profitability, and an especially important chapter examines the Internet as the ultimate Customer Equity tool. Here the authors show how companies such as Intuit.com, Schwab.com, and Priceline.com have used more than one or all three drivers to increase Customer Equity. In this age of one-to-one marketing, understanding how to drive Customer Equity is central to the success of any firm. In particular, Driving Customer Equity will be essential reading for any marketing manager and, for that matter, any manager concerned with growing the value of the firm's customer base.

by Paul E. Green I am honored and pleased to respond to authors request to write a Fore word for this excellent collection of essays on conjoint analysis and related topics. While a number of survey articles and sporadic book chapters have appeared on the subject, to the best of my knowledge this book represents the first volume of contributed essays on conjoint analysis. The book re flects not only the geographical diversity of its contributors but also the variety and depth of their topics. The development of conjoint analysis and its application to marketing and business research is noteworthy, both in its eclectic roots (psychometrics, statistics, operations research, economics) and the fact that its development reflects the efforts of a large variety of professionals -academics, market ing research consultants, industry practitioners, and software developers. Reasons for the early success and diffusion of conjoint analysis are not hard to find. First, by the early sixties, precursory psychometric techniques (e.g., multidimensional scaling and correspondence analysis, cluster analy sis, and general multivariate techniques) had already shown their value in practical business research and application. Second, conjoint analysis pro vided a new and powerful array of methods for tackling the important problem of representing and predicting buyer preference judgments and choice behavior-clearly a major problem area in marketing.

As the service sector expands into the global economy, a new science of service is emerging, one that is dedicated to encouraging service innovation by applying scientific understanding, engineering discipline, and management practice to designing, improving, and scaling service systems. Handbook of Service Science takes the first major steps to clarifying the definition, role, and future of this nascent field. Incorporating work by scholars from across the spectrum of service research, the volume presents multidisciplinary perspectives on the nature and theory of service, on current research and practice in design, operations, delivery, and innovation of service, and on future opportunities and potential of service research. Handbook of Service Science provides a comprehensive reference suitable for a wide-reaching audience including researchers, practitioners, managers, and students who aspire to learn about or to create a deeper scientific foundation for service design and engineering, service experience and marketing, and service management and innovation.

To get the full benefit of branding, companies must actually live the brands they sell. This approach is called integrated branding and it's not just a communications strategy. Companies must demonstrate to themselves and their customers that its brands are what the company is. The Brand and the company are inseparable, and that realization must pervade the entire organization, from new product development to human resource management. Integrated branding is a way of operating, an overall way of doing business, and a way to make certain a company's products are based on the right answers to two mutually reinforcing questions: What do customers value and what does the company do best in relation to what the customers want? The tools to accomplish these goals are called drivers. LePla and Parker show clearly and comprehensively how drivers work and how to apply them. Not just for marketing directors, strategy planners and executive policy makers will also find this to be an essential resource in their quest to increase market leadership and to enhance the bottom line. Through their integrated brand model, LePla and Parker discuss both organization drivers and brand drivers. They see the process as a research-driven one that gets everyone in the organization contributing to the effectiveness of its brands. With brand tools accepted throughout the company, people can determine more easily and accurately whether their decisions and actions will actually further the brand. The authors show how different companies apply their model in different ways. LePla and Parker also include discussions of how to determine brand structure, how an integrated brand applies to marketing communications, and how integrated brands can help companies when they go public.

RECALCULATING, 97 EXPERTS ON DRIVING SMALL BUSINESS GROWTH offers strategic, tactical, tested solutions to a variety of problems and from a multitude of expert sources. These senior-level contributors are sector stakeholders, advisors, and practitioners. Their chosen topics address the most common issues, problems, and opportunities identified, continuously requested by readers to the editors of Small Business Digest during the past 15+ years. Many of the solutions have come from experts who have appeared in SBD’s publications, radio programs, and conferences. They were asked to write special 1000-word contributions for the book based on their expertise. Among the companies represented by senior level contributors are HP, Yellow Pages, Staples, GoDaddy, and Intuit. Topics covered range from better sales management to moving to the cloud to better financing options. Space is also devoted to management problems, benefits needs, and leadership issues. Each contributor brings a unique slant to common and not so common questions involving finance, sales, marketing, operation, technology, personnel management, and benefits maximization.

Seeing the world's biggest brands gain ground over the world's markets, you can't deny that the 25,000 students in the UK studying marketing will never understand their subject without knowing how branding works. This is THE key scholarly text in this crucial topic, an already hugely respected title and big seller in the field. It follows on from the introductory textbook Creating Powerful Brands, and comes highly illustrated with real examples of influential marketing campaigns. This is the book that will take students to the next level with the skills to develop and implement their own branding strategy.