Our thinking is appearing in publications around the world

Out of Aaker's five brand books, what precepts stand out as one of the top ten? Which are most critical “to do” tasks for someone charged with creating or managing a business? What do you need to know to excel at building a brand? 

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.

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

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

Prophet contributed to the 70th anniversary of the GfM (Swiss Marketing Association) through 7 articles published in their symposium. Articles in English and in German

Scott Davis and 7 other visionary marketers reveal their predictions for the marketing industry in the next decade in ANA Magazine.

Jay Milliken and Andres Nicholls discuss how strategy-led design and understanding customer behavior are the key elements for the success of Emart.

Philip Otley explains in his article why pricing may be the sharpest double-edged sword that senior management can wield in their bid to create value for the enterprise.

The ability to create and manage the customer experience is something more businesses would like to get right. It's an attainable goal. All it takes is the mindset combined with consistent and thoughtful deployment of tools that allow customer experiences to be monitored and optimized. 

Prophet strives to understand how executives in brand and general management are making strides in driving growth and building brand equity.

In this Q&A with Guy Kawasaki, David Aaker explains how to use branding as a weapon against your competition.

Learn more about Prophet's European Corporate Reputation Study run in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland.