Aaker on Branding - Second Edition

Aaker updates this comprehensive overview of brands, outlining their strategic significance and the ways in which they should be established and managed.

The author here assesses the seismic shift in the ways in which brands are understood—they have been reinterpreted as assets, a reimagining that “started a dramatic and far-reaching cascade of change.” Aaker not only charts this grand historical change (and its organizational ramifications); he also meticulously details the proper way to create and manage a brand portfolio. At the heart of his brief but comprehensive take are the “5 Bs”: brand equity, brand relevance, brand image, brand loyalty, and brand portfolio (each element is crucial to the whole). As the author contends, a brand is much more than an identifiable name or logo—it’s a “promise” to consistently deliver to costumers a product or service, as well as something more intangibly personal (“It is also a journey, an evolving relationship based on a customer’s perceptions and experiences whenever he or she connects to the brand”). The manager of a brand must find ways to differentiate it from its commercial rivals, and this includes crafting a kind of personality, one buoyed by creating “signature stories” that break through “media clutter, information overload, and audience skepticism.” (Aaker also discusses “signature social programs” that express a brand’s moral conscience.) The case for the central importance of branding is painstakingly and convincingly made—the author identifies 16 ways a brand adds value to an organization. This new edition adds more illustrative case studies—this exacting study is relentlessly concrete—and condenses Aaker’s considerable body of work on the subject found in other books. The author’s writing is always clear and mercifully absent the technical jargon and New-Age cant routinely found in books of this kind. This is precisely what one wants from a single-volume study aspiring to be authoritative—the work is lucid, thorough, and empirically straightforward.

A valuable resource filled with edifying information and actionable insights.