Brand Asset Management: Driving Profitable Growth through Your Brands

Citation

Alpan, B. (2001), "Brand Asset Management: Driving Profitable Growth through Your Brands", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 18 No. 6, pp. 534-542. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.2001.18.6.534.3

Brand Asset Management: Driving Profitable Growth through Your Brands is a well‐written analysis of where brand management stands today, where it should be, and how far it can drive your business once done systematically and holistically.

The book is written in a step‐by‐step tutorial fashion which takes you through the whole brand management process. It is written in a “breezy”, easy‐to‐read language, while the business cases quoted throughout the whole book make the reading even more engaging and pleasant. It is composed of four major parts (so‐called “phases”):

1. 1.

   (1) developing a brand vision;

2. 2.

   (2) determining your brand picture;

3. 3.

   (3) developing a brand asset management (BAM) strategy; and

4. 4.

   (4) supporting a brand asset management culture.

Each part is full of real cases, examples and, of course, instances from Scott Davis’s professional life. Needless to say, coming from a brand‐based company like Proctor & Gamble, Davis has a lot to say on brand management and how important a role brands play in a company’s growth and future.

Phase 1 emphasizes the importance of creating, establishing and owning a brand vision, which is the fundamental quality of a good BAM strategy. Davis gives you the recipe for setting a brand vision from scratch and gathering company resources around clearly defined, internally agreed‐on business goals.

Phase 2 helps you to see your brand through your customers’ eyes via understanding the combination of your brand’s image, brand contract (what the brand promises to consumers in terms of benefit/service/experience), perceptions and perspectives of your brand as well as the category you are in (p.53). Once you have understood all these, you have mastered the skills and knowledge to develop a customer‐based model as your brand picture. In this section not only do you find basic concepts like the “value pyramid” or “brand persona” introduced, but you see them come alive through real cases and brand‐to‐brand comparisons. By the end of phase two, you are ready and fully equiped to develop your BAM strategy, which comes up as the next chapter.

Phase 3 is composed of five steps, all which need to be well understood and skillfully crafted. They are:

1. 1.

   (1) positioning your brand for success;

2. 2.

   (2) extending your brand;

3. 3.

   (3) communicating your brand’s positioning;

4. 4.

   (4) leveraging your brand to maximize channel influence; and

5. 5.

   (5) pricing your brand at a premium.

Positioning your brand is, I think, the most cruical stage in developing an effective BAM strategy. It requires a lot of pre‐work to create (phases 1 and2) and even more work and effort to fully establish and maintain it. If you do it right though, you have surely taken a big step towards sustainable, profitable growth. The Charles Schwab story (p. 112), given as an example for good brand positioning, is right on the spot. You realize that through well‐thought‐out brand positioning that is up‐to‐date and competitive, you always have a winning and leading edge in the market, even if your product/ service benefit has changed. Davis also points out that brand positioning should be deployed by top management, not by the advertising agencies, and that the corporate culture should embrace it to the fullest. This is a fair warning, or good advice so to say, to companies that undermine the power of branding even today and think of it just as a creative gimmick.

Extending your brand is one of the most interesting chapers in the book. It gives you examples of success and failure in companies’ quest for expansion and growth. Once you qualify your extension plan according to Davis’s four principles (brand vision consistency/strenghthening brand picture/overall positioning consistency/risk assesment) (p. 132), you can develop your extension strategy, do risk/opportunity assessment, generate brand‐based ideas, develop the concepts, and follow up with your business analysis.

Communicating your brand introduces the AUTHOR model (awareness, understanding, direction, inspiration, engagement, naturalness, criteria and education) and the five principles for successful brand‐based communications. Out of the five principles, Davis spends a good amount of time on integrated marketing communications strategy, focusing on different tools such as advertising, public relations, sponsorships, sales/trade/consumer promotions, and direct marketing

Leveraging your brand to maximize channel influence is a proof for Davis’s position on the importance of branding and that it should be leveraged in all corporate functions. Not in every book that talks about “branding” will you come across the subject of distribution. With Davis’s examples on effects of branding on distribution, value of “BAM deployment” gets heightened in this chapter and even more so in the following one.

Pricing your brand at a premium is when you start reaping the benefits of effective BAM and is, in fact, the ultimate goal behind all branding activities. By having a strong brand equity, you can always attract customers easier to your core brand and brand extensions and turn your business into a monstrous profit generator. Once again Davis is full of examples in this chapter with a broad range of different brands and industries.

Phases 4 and 5 are about how you should follow up your brand asset management “investment.” There are two steps to this. First, you need to measure your return on your “branding” investment, seek for improvement areas and adjust your branding efforts accordingly. Davis does not leave you alone in this process and provides you with both quantitative and qualitative research techniques, including Robi Eight. At the end of his book, Davis takes you to the second step to measuring return on brand investment, and once again highlights the importance of top management’s role in the BAM process. In fact, he goes even further, saying that organizations should be “brand based” and that “brand teams” should become an integral part of every strategic decision‐making process.

Brand Asset Management, Driving Profitable Growth through Your Brands is an excellent book on the power of branding. It is enriched with loads of case stories, which are enlightening for readers closely acquainted with US based businesses (one suggestion: it might require some background work to fully grasp the stories behind some of the cases for international readers).

As smooth as it can be, Davis takes you through the BAM process, giving you more than enough tools and knowledge to steer your brand from start‐up to top. The book is informative, well‐organized and easy to follow: an absolute must read for today’s managers and the ones to be!