Brand Aid: A Quick Reference Guide to Solving Your Branding Problems and Strengthening Your Market Position - Hardcover

Vanauken, Brad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814434738 ISBN 13: 9780814434734

Publisher: AMACOM, 2015

Synopsis

Branding is more than a great logo. A brand is the essence of an organization - its DNA - impacting its continual success. It is absolutely essential to get it right.

Brand managers, marketers, and executives have long turned to this trusted guide to troubleshoot their branding problems. Written by an acknowledged expert with 30 years of experience building world-class brands, Brand Aid covers topics ranging from research and positioning to brand equity management and architecture strategy.

Bringing together illuminating case studies, best practices, and the latest research, this edition offers invaluable advice on every aspect of brand management including:

• The 6 most powerful sources of brand differentiation
• 5 elements that trigger brand insistence
• Turning brand strategy into advertising
• Online branding
• Private label brands
• Creating “category of one” brands
• Social responsibility, sustainability, and storytelling
• 60 nontraditional marketing techniques
• Metrics

A treasure trove of techniques, templates, and rules of thumb, Brand Aid is the ideal resource for anyone responsible for building their organization’s brand.

About this title

About the Author

Brad VanAuken is the president and founder of BrandForward, Inc., and former director of brand management and marketing for Hallmark Cards.

From the Back Cover

Brand Aid guides you through the entire branding process, from using social media effectively to linking your brand to human needs to developing a brand architecture strategy that unifies merging companies. Step by step, it breaks down a vast body of knowledge into helpful overviews and worksheets, checklists, case studies, research findings, rules of thumb, and more.

Whether you're branding a company, product or service, museum, trade association, municipality, or anything, this book explains how to:

* Get and analyze information about each consumer segment

* Define your brand essence, promise, archetype, and personality

* Position your brand against the competition

* Make your brand identity consistent across the enterprise

* Bolster the five qualities that create brand insistence

* Translate your brand strategy into a multichannel advertising plan

* Create great online content, blogs, SEO, email marketing, mobile apps, and more online requirements

* Make your brand promise a reality by cultivating a brand-driven organization

* Extend your brand into new products or leverage it globally

* Use qualitative techniques for researching your brand's impact

* And much more

Your building, your products, your people. They're immensely valuable. But only your brand is irreplaceable. Get it right, and your company thrives. Make too many mistakes, and watch out! Brand Aid gets you up to speed on every branding essential--sidestepping pitfalls and positioning your brand for enduring success.

Brad VanAuken is the president and founder of BrandForward, Inc., a brand strategy consultancy with clients throughout the world. Previously, he was director of brand management and marketing for Hallmark Cards and Vice President of Marketing for Element K. An active speaker and writer, Brad has been interviewed regularly in the national media, including Adweek, CNN, Entrepreneur, and Investor's Business Daily.

From the Inside Flap

Brand Aid guides you through the entire branding process, from using social media effectively to linking your brand to human needs to developing a brand architecture strategy that unifies merging companies. Step by step, it breaks down a vast body of knowledge into helpful overviews and worksheets, checklists, case studies, research findings, rules of thumb, and more.

Whether you're branding a company, product or service, museum, trade association, municipality, or anything, this book explains how to:

* Get and analyze information about each consumer segment

* Define your brand essence, promise, archetype, and personality

* Position your brand against the competition

* Make your brand identity consistent across the enterprise

* Bolster the five qualities that create brand insistence

* Translate your brand strategy into a multichannel advertising plan

* Create great online content, blogs, SEO, email marketing, mobile apps, and more online requirements

* Make your brand promise a reality by cultivating a brand-driven organization

* Extend your brand into new products or leverage it globally

* Use qualitative techniques for researching your brand's impact

* And much more

Your building, your products, your people. They're immensely valuable. But only your brand is irreplaceable. Get it right, and your company thrives. Make too many mistakes, and watch out! Brand Aid gets you up to speed on every branding essential--sidestepping pitfalls and positioning your brand for enduring success.

Brad VanAuken is the president and founder of BrandForward, Inc., a brand strategy consultancy with clients throughout the world. Previously, he was director of brand management and marketing for Hallmark Cards and Vice President of Marketing for Element K. An active speaker and writer, Brad has been interviewed regularly in the national media, including Adweek, CNN, Entrepreneur, and Investor's Business Daily.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

New in This Revised Edition

While the first edition of the book included a chapter on brand building on the Internet, it did not include reference to blogs or social media, as those came into popular use between 2001 and 2010. (I wrote the original book between 1999 and 2001. It was published in 2003.) So, as you might imagine, I have completely rewritten this chapter, which is now titled "Online Brand Building."

Since I wrote the first edition of the book, shared values, social responsibility, sustainability, brand storytelling, neuromarketing, and big data have surged in popularity with marketers. I have added something about each of these developments in this edition. I added information on private label brands and on upscale consumers and their desires. I also included more in-depth information on basic human needs, fears, and other behavioral motivators.

Based on a burgeoning demand for brand architecture strategy by clients that have grown through mergers and acquisitions, I have expanded my coverage of that topic. I have added information on how to differentiate commodities and how to create "category of one" brands, a particularly powerful but seldom-used branding concept.

I now include brand archetypes and a couple of other new elements in brand positioning statements, which are reflected in the new edition of the book. I have also added a section summarizing the six most powerful sources of brand differentiation. And, finally, I have added many new brand examples featuring more contemporary brands.

I have extensively revised the book, but the importance of branding has not changed, nor have its core tenets, so you will find some older material and examples from the first edition of the book. I have not eliminated "evergreen" material that continues to be relevant today.

Brad VanAuken

Edition details

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0814434738
• ISBN 13: 9780814434734
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 352