My Top 6 Aaker on Brands Blog Posts

After some 14 months of blogging about branding, I have over 60 postings. Looking over that list, I picked out three that had the most impact in terms of interest, comments, and readership and three that described a topic that had a big influence on me.

Impact on the audience

The post “Secrets of Social Media Revealed 50 Years Ago,” also published in HBR, coincidentally got a lot of attention on Twitter. It describes Ernest Dichter’s classic study of WofM brand communication, which revealed four motivations to talk about brands and two motivations to listen - findings that are relevant to social media today.

The post “Brand Preference vs. Brand Relevance — Two Ways to Compete,” communicates the central point of my book, Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant — that “my brand is better than your brand” marketing in established categories just doesn’t generate sales growth. The only way to grow is to innovate to create “must haves” that define new subcategories.

An early post, “Aaker’s Top Ten Brand Precepts” identified what to me are the critical elements in understanding and managing brands. It includes comments on brands as assets, the brand relationship spectrum, branded differentiators, the richness of brands and six other “need to know” ideas. It represented a career’s worth of research and writing.

Topics meaningful to me

Brand stories inspire me and stimulate my ideas. Of the dozen or so brand stories in past postings, “Muji — The No-Brand Brand” story of the retail brand Muji, stands out. Muji is about simplicity, moderation, humility, close-to-nature and self-restraint. Ironically, this effort to eliminate self-expressive benefits actually provides self-expressive benefits. Muji has created its own subcategory that has not been penetrated.

The post “The ‘Most Brand Insights’ Book? — A Surprising Choice” identified Lou Gerstner’s bio, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? as the book that I often go back to for ideas and role models. Gerstner took over an IBM that was fading and dramatically changed the organization. He broke down silos, centralized much of brand building around the IBM brand, replaced approximately 70 ad agencies with one, and much more.

The post “Three Classic Books That Influenced Me” identifies key works by Peter Drucker, Ted Levitt and Alfred Sloan that have meant a lot to our field and to me. Their work is timeless and has shaped much of what executives now do as a matter of course and much more of what they should be doing.

My efforts have been guiding the objectives set forth in my very first post — to hang out with people that share my passion about branding, to advance the idea that building brand should be a priority, and to contribute to making brand building more efficient, effective and accountable. I’m not sure how well these objectives have been advanced. but the effort sure has been fun!

Posted December 29, 2011 / Permalink / Subscribe (e-mail) / Subscribe (RSS)
Tags: brand relevance branding

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