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Title: Brand Portfolio Strategy : Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy, Leverage, and Clarity by David A. Aaker ISBN: 0-7432-4938-0 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 06 April, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: David Aaker is brilliant
Comment: After reading about this book in Investor's Business Daily, The New York Times, and the Financial Times, I just had to see what everybody was raving about. I've concluded that David Aaker is a genuis.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not As Good As Aaker's Previous (or First) books on Branding
Comment: The book is overly filled with newly-invented jargons such as Brand Differentiator, Brand Relevance, Range Brand, Sub-brand with Brand Differentiator, which can make readers overwhelmed with decoding the content.
A responsible writer on Branding should help readers simplify the complex and make it easy for them to know the true picture of branding.
This book is not entirely new. About 20% of the content(I would say more than the author admitted in the Preface) is based on Aaker's old books like Brand Equity, Building Brand Identity, and Brand Leadership. Examples are predictable and have been used before in his old books, mostly including Intel, Marriott, and the like. The cases drawn for this book can be very biased since Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Dove and so forth are world-class,big budget brands. Of course they have the know-how and abundant resources to build successful brands. Aaker should quote some medium or low budget brand cases that turn themselves into successful brands.
As a Vice-Chairman of Prophet, a brand consultancy, readers may worry about Aaker's (not just a Brand/Marketing Professor from Berkeley now!) objectivity in examples selections as well.
Besides, the Clients that Prophet serve are mostly not the world-class brands(except just one or two, like Adidas). This may reduce the credibility of Aaker as a branding expert in the first place since he wrote about the world-class brands, not really building the world-class brands himself or with his colleagues.
There is a tendency for authors to rush out new books these days. In fact, quality does count. For authors who have been preaching the importance of good quality in the branding process, they should walk the talk themselves!
Rating: 5
Summary: Aaker's Greatest Achievement Thus Far
Comment: 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.
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Title: Wordcraft : The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business by Alex Frankel ISBN: 1400051045 Publisher: Crown Publishing Group Pub. Date: 20 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands by Alina Wheeler, Alina R. Wheeler ISBN: 0471213268 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 15 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Building Reputational Capital: Strategies for Integrity and Fair Play That Improve the Bottom Line by Kevin T. Jackson ISBN: 0195161386 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: March, 2004 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market by Gerald Zaltman ISBN: 1578518261 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 21 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Managing Brand Equity by David A. Aaker ISBN: 0029001013 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 09 September, 1991 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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