Brand Portfolio Strategy: Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy, Leverage, and Clarity

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 368 pages
• Published by: Free Press March 30, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0743249380
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0743249386
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
Corporations may legally be considered persons, but to promote their individuality to consumers, they need a brand—and a strategy. This intriguing marketing treatise teaches companies how to understand and exploit the finely graded social system that brands inhabit in the marketplace. Projecting both "personality elements" and "emotional and self-expressive" qualities onto brands, customers are skeptical of parvenu brands that try to move up into super premium markets, contemptuous of brands that move down into "value" markets, and uneasy about brands that associate with less reputable labels. To help businesspeople sort through and capitalize on such perceptual niceties, Aaker, a consultant, professor and author of Building Strong Brands, plots out a complicated taxonomy of master brands, subbrands, endorser brands, brand alliances, branded energizers, silver bullet brands, cash cow brands and "fighter" brands (the latter protect more important brands from being sullied by competition with lesser brands). Aaker encourages companies to think of their brands as members of a football team, each with a well-defined role to play, and offers a wealth of case studies and exercises to help managers decide how to handle their portfolios. Aaker’s readable prose imparts real substance to these concepts, and provides insight into such issues as how to clarify a confusing assortment of brands, differentiate a company’s brands from its competitors’, introduce a new brand or kill off an old one. While the book is aimed at marketing executives, who will glean much practical advice from it, interested lay readers will find it a revealing insider’s look at how the business world conceives of and manipulates consumer psychology.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Review
Bernhard Eggli

Managing Director, Head of Brand Management, UBS

There's no authority on branding to equal David Aaker, and here he shows again his weight of experience and keenness of insight. This is a thoughtful exploration of how to structure, manage, and extend a brand portfolio for maximum value. The passages on how to energize and differentiate a brand are especially illuminating. Excellent.



Sam Hill

President, Helios Consulting; former Vice Chairman, DMB&B

Brand portfolio optimization will be the value-creating management approach of the next decade, and will change the way we do business as fundamentally as has business process reengineering or six sigma. Dr. Aaker has written a simple and pragmatic guidebook that will be awesomely useful to strategists. He has almost single-handedly transformed branding from an art into a science, and no one is better qualified to lead the discussion on brand portfolio strategy.



Anil Menon

Vice President, Corporate Brand Strategy & Worldwide Market Intelligence, IBM Corporation

Effective branding is a mission-critical business priority. And, as product-markets increasingly commoditize, a clear brand strategy can offer a path to competitive differentiation, particularly for B2B companies. Professor Aaker is at his brilliant best in this book with clear advice on how to make brands 'real' in the daily life of an organization and relevant in the marketplace.



Philip Kotler

Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Brand Portfolio Strategy is a 'must' read for any company saddled with brands whose roles and relationships go begging for clarification and wiser direction. David Aaker, our most original conceptual thinker on branding, has again pushed brand management into exciting new territory.



John Elkins, EVP, Global Brand, Marketing & Corporate Relations, Visa International

With timely insight, Aaker shows how to use portfolio tools to help firms address the strategic challenge of staying relevant and differentiated in dynamic markets.



Anna Catalano

Group Vice President, Marketing, BP

Aaker's epilogue of twenty takeaways should be a bible for all brand managers who want to drive business success.



Peter Sealey

Ph.D., former Chief Marketing Officer, The Coca-Cola Company

Brand Portfolio Strategy hits the mark dead center into the most relevant and hotly debated topic in marketing today. Aaker builds on his previous trilogy of seminal branding books with his best offering yet -- a great strategic and practical read.



Reader Reviews
Aaker has earned and deserves his renown as an expert on branding. Perhaps you have read one or more of his previous books: Managing Brand Equity (1991), Building Strong Brands (1995), Developing Business Strategies (1998), Brand Leadership (with Eric Joachimsthaler, 2000), and Strategic Market Management (2001). In my opinion Brand Portfolio Strategy is Aaaker's most important work thus far. One of the most popular recent buzz words is "portfolio" which, insofar as strategy is concerned, is best understood in terms of diversity which creates or allows for options and opportunities otherwise unavailable. According to Aaker, the brand portfolio strategy "provides the structure and discipline needed to have successful business strategy. A brand portfolio strategy which is confused and incoherent can handicap and sometimes doom a business strategy. One that fosters organizational and market strategies, creates relevant. differentiated and energized brand assets, and leverage es those brand assets, on the other hand, will. support and enable business strategy." The brand portfolio strategy which Aaker advocates, therefore, creates relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity. There is a diagram inside the front and back covers of this book which illustrates precisely what such a strategy involves, and, what the various relationships are between and among its various components. (As I read this book, I found it helpful to refer back to the diagram occasionally as I would to a map throughout a journey. The same diagram also appears on page 17.) I appreciate the fact that Aaker illustrates each of his core concepts by examining various corporations' successes and failures with a brand portfolio strategy, notably Intel, Disney, Microsoft, Citigroup, SONY, Dove, GE Appliances, Dell, and Unilever. After having read the previous sentence, decision-makers in small-to-midsize companies may conclude that the brand portfolio strategy offers little (if any) value to them. That would be a mistake and I apologize if I inadvertently encourage anyone to reach that conclusion. Aaker's quotation of a remark by Frank Lloyd Wright seems (to me) relevant both to the brand portfolio and to almost every organization, regardless of size of nature: "Always design [or redesign] a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, and environment in a city plan." That is as true for a family-owned automotive repair shop as it is for General Motors. One of this book's several value-added benefits consists of dozens of quotations such as Wright's which provide Aaker's narrative with tasty seasoning while helping him to clarify his key points. Here are some other quotations which I especially appreciate: "Beware of all enterprises which require new clothes." Henry David Thoreau "Plans are nothing, planning is everything." Dwight Eisenhower (Eisenhower's observation reminded me of a Hebrew aphorism: "Man plans and then God howls with laughter.") "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay "You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only one who does what you do." Jerry Garcia Whatever their size and nature may be, all organizations really do need to position themselves so as to be perceived in the marketplace as having relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity. In this brilliant book, Aaker explains HOW to accomplish that. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Harvard Business Review on Brand Management, Kaplan and Norton's The Strategy-Focused Organization, Godin's The Purple Cow, Finzel's Change Is Like a Slinky.