Our thinking appears in marketing articles and publications around the world

These are tough times for companies trying to build and maintain their reputations. Between the sluggish economy, business toe-stubbing (and worse), and a public with a long memory and an increasingly skeptical nature, recovering from the reputational hits that have hammered U.S. businesses in recent years is going to be a slow process.

Prophet’s third annual corporate reputation study reflected the confluence of these and other factors, as overall reputation scores fell across almost all industry sectors.

Meet James Walker. Prophet’s newest senior partner will be spending the foreseeable future hopping between his home in the U.K. and the States as he helps bring analytics to life for savvy marketers. He’s spent the last 20 years in the marketing sciences, on the big agency (J. Walter Thompson), big consultancy (Accenture) and entrepreneurial sides. He recently shared his views of the new practice area he’s leading, and a peek at other interests that occupy his time.

David Aaker was profiled by Techronicle, the biannually published Business and Technology magazine for senior business leaders.

Prophet senior partner James Walker has spent his entire career in marketing consulting, analytics and research. He was fascinated to see neuromarketing becoming more mainstream, so he met up with Hilke Plassmann, the global thought leader in the application of neuroscience to marketing. Hilke is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at INSEAD where she teaches marketing management in France and Singapore in INSEAD’s MBA program, and neuromarketing in INSEAD’s Executive Education Program. She is currently Visiting Faculty at The Wharton School as part of the INSEAD–Wharton alliance.

We hear it all the time among clients, within companies and at meetings. Everyone understands that if you stand still in today’s rapidly changing environment, then you’ll be choking on the other guy’s dust as you fade into irrelevance. The ability to get ahead, much less to transform, is today’s business imperative. But it takes change agents to lead the charge.

All too often, though, stuff gets in the way. The barriers of silos. Resistance to change. A shortage of the right skills for the challenges. The fact is that transforming a business is really hard work.

In this article, David Aaker shows how to identify the “must haves” and discusses barriers to competitors such as going beyond functional benefits, finding shared interests with customers, ongoing innovation, superior execution, scaling the concept, becoming an exemplar, and branding the innovation.
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Prophet senior partner James Walker popped down a couple of streets from our New York office to meet up with Tulin Erdem at Stern Business School, New York University. Tulin is one of Prophet's academic partners and is the Leonard N. Stern Professor of Business and Professor of Marketing at Stern.

Short CMO tenure has become a widely accepted fact of life. The arguments for this state are quite familiar: poor cultural fit, overly ambitious agenda, lack of productivity, change in business strategy, and no budget, to name just a few.

More often than not, there’s a more fundamental issue at play, and it’s one that is systemic across organizations. There’s a missing piece of what we call marketing middleware — the “Intel Inside” of marketing.

JCPenney will be the retailer to watch this year. The company has launched a major rebranding effort with a full overhaul of its merchandising strategy, and Forbes is already touting it as the most interesting retailer in 2012.

You can run, but you can’t hide. Especially in a social world.

It’s one of the stark realities that hit home last week with the uproar sparked when the Susan G. Komen Foundation yanked, then reinstated, its funding to Planned Parenthood.

At best, you can hope to influence perceptions. That takes a deep understanding of today’s milieu and how your brand holds up against the increasingly critical guideposts of openness, transparency, authenticity.

Komen failed on all three fronts.

Winning the brand-relevance war involves engaging in substantial or transformational innovation to change what customers buy, to manage perceptions of the resulting new subcategory, and to build barriers to prevent competitors from overcoming their visibility and credibility barriers.

Winning the brand relevance competition requires finding the right “must have,” bringing it successfully to market and then growing the resulting business. The problem is that success breeds competitors and the benefits of pioneering a new category or subcategory can be short-lived. A key step is to create barriers such as ongoing innovation, a large group of satisfied or even passionate customers, proprietary technology and preempted distribution.

It is Econ 101: Create an environment with weak competition. The alternative, fi ghting the “my brand is better than your brand” preference war, is rarely successful at changing market positions because of the resulting customer momentum.

Aaker details one of the growth paths described in his book, Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant: Removing negatives, and reasons that people use when deciding to exclude your brand from consideration.

James Walker and Kevin O'Donnell share their takeaways from the recent Consumer Electronics Show Las Vegas.

Consumer brands have invested billions to create experiences built upon distinctive combinations of products, services and people. Companies on the business-to-business (B2B) side, however, are typically less focused on creating customer experiences as a way to achieve competitive advantage. And that might seem to make sense. Yet a closer look shows that the attributes describing B2B winners – reliability, accuracy, quality, ease – are often the hallmarks of a great customer experience. 

2011 was a year filled with great partnerships. Who could forget William and Kate’s grand wedding watched by billions around the globe, or the unions of Reese Witherspoon, Daniel Craig, and Nick Lachey? There was also the 72-day marriage of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries -- okay, so maybe not all partnerships are meant to be.

It has become obvious that neither consumers nor businesses can evade the new digital world. As digitalization accelerates, its impact shows up not only through big players like Facebook, eBay, and Google, but also through digital media’s effect on the relationship between companies and customers.

Marketing is increasingly under pressure to make the most of its brands, its investments, and its organization. Although this pressure is particularly intense in tough economic times, the topic is increasingly relevant even in good times.

Got engagement? You’d better hope so. Customer engagement is an important indicator of marketing and value proposition performance. Kevin and Brian outline a three-step process for ensuring success.