2006. Preface
Getting your brand to work harder, to ensure that it makes its proper mark, isn’t just about money. Indeed, money may be the least of your problems. Getting brands to work on small
budgets is more than possible; it is the norm. Hearing a professor of marketing say that branding was a waste of time unless you had ?10 million to spend was one of the impulses behind
the writing of this book.
Good branding takes a lot of good thinking. This is not to say that brands should be managed by intellectuals, or that we should allow the jargon-spouting folk from ‘the agency’ to take hold of the reins. Brand management certainly engages the brain but it doesn’t disengage common sense, nor should it stop us from using everyday language. The fact that too many books on branding read like PhD theses on anthropology was another of the impulses behind the writing of this rather more practically minded book.
This book is intended for the business manager, the marketer, the brand manager, and all those involved with building and defining their own brands. So many branding books appear designed for the professional advertising executive and associated media and design folk, that I have deliberately steered a course towards the owners of the brand rather than the agencies that will support them.
Some people argue that brands are dying, others that they are the coerstone of our ivilisation, and yet others see them as a curse of mode life. What we can agree is that brands are changing, as they always have and always must to survive. In this, brands inhabit a brutally Darwinian world, and the key question for those wishing to survive must be – what is meant by
‘the fittest’? In answering this question I have tried to navigate a course between the lovers and the haters of brands, occasionally flirting with each camp as seems appropriate.
Above all else, the brand is something to be managed; it must be protected, nurtured, exploited and changed. Few marketers will have the task of creating a brand from scratch, most will inherit one, for better or worse. Inheriting a brand is like inheriting a grand stately home – a significant luxury, a major responsibility, and occasionally an impending liability.
Helping you to achieve good brand management is the purpose of this
Getting your brand to work harder, to ensure that it makes its proper mark, isn’t just about money. Indeed, money may be the least of your problems. Getting brands to work on small
budgets is more than possible; it is the norm. Hearing a professor of marketing say that branding was a waste of time unless you had ?10 million to spend was one of the impulses behind
the writing of this book.
Good branding takes a lot of good thinking. This is not to say that brands should be managed by intellectuals, or that we should allow the jargon-spouting folk from ‘the agency’ to take hold of the reins. Brand management certainly engages the brain but it doesn’t disengage common sense, nor should it stop us from using everyday language. The fact that too many books on branding read like PhD theses on anthropology was another of the impulses behind the writing of this rather more practically minded book.
This book is intended for the business manager, the marketer, the brand manager, and all those involved with building and defining their own brands. So many branding books appear designed for the professional advertising executive and associated media and design folk, that I have deliberately steered a course towards the owners of the brand rather than the agencies that will support them.
Some people argue that brands are dying, others that they are the coerstone of our ivilisation, and yet others see them as a curse of mode life. What we can agree is that brands are changing, as they always have and always must to survive. In this, brands inhabit a brutally Darwinian world, and the key question for those wishing to survive must be – what is meant by
‘the fittest’? In answering this question I have tried to navigate a course between the lovers and the haters of brands, occasionally flirting with each camp as seems appropriate.
Above all else, the brand is something to be managed; it must be protected, nurtured, exploited and changed. Few marketers will have the task of creating a brand from scratch, most will inherit one, for better or worse. Inheriting a brand is like inheriting a grand stately home – a significant luxury, a major responsibility, and occasionally an impending liability.
Helping you to achieve good brand management is the purpose of this