Our thinking appears in marketing articles and publications around the world

It is important to create a brand-centric culture that's open to and encourages change, where management is aligned on everyone's role in fostering that environment, and where the basis for moving forward is a shared vision of and commitment to the best of what the brand stands for.

Technology has made it possible, through advanced research and information gathering techniques, to forge a deeper understanding of what matters most to customers.

After years of paying lip service to the importance of marketing while engineering and design ruled the roost, technology companies are learning that maybe they need to be more like other businesses after all.

David Aaker and several other business gurus discuss key consumer trends and new strategic thinking for companies seeking world-beating brand behavior.

Despite marketing's lingering reputation in some senior management circles as the function that is more interested in spending money than bringing it in, top-level marketers increasingly understand they share the same mandate as their peers in the executive suite: To help drive profitable business growth.

When it comes to assessing marketing's effectiveness in creating the type of customer relationships that fuel business growth, consider this: Maybe marketers should stop thinking so much like traditional marketers.

What's in a name? Plenty. It's the most obvious representation of a brand and comes with all sorts of positive and negative associations, externally and internally. (BrandWeek, January 2006) 

Better-informed consumers are changing the nature of the customer-brand relationship as well as the nature of branding building. As the importance of non-marketing touchpoints such as customer service and the actual in-store experience continues to increase, marketing is challenged to step beyond its traditional role to prove its value in generating business growth.

Marketers aiming to better position themselves and the marketing function to add real value to the organization have their work cut out for them. A new year makes the timing right to recap three of the most critical prescriptions for change.

David Aaker's autobiography details the intellectual journey that led to a focus on brands and chronicles his attempts to influence management practices.

Innovation is a major hot button with businesses these days, given its critical role in driving organic business growth. As one survey of 940 senior managers found, all considered growing revenues through innovation as critical to success. Yet more than half were unhappy with their innovation investment returns.

CMOs need to leverage corporate and business-unit capabilities to reinvent the marketing function.

If it's so axiomatic that "your next best customer is the one you already have," why do marketers expend so much energy — and hard-fought resources — chasing after new ones?

This book combines the thought leadership of the school's highly regarded marketing faculty with perspectives of senior business executives with years of experience in brand building. It includes a chapter written by Scott Davis titled "Building a Brand-Driven Organization."

An organization's senior-most marketing executives can position themselves to better serve as the missing link in the executive team — between marketing's capabilities and corporate growth.

There is a growing need for businesses, and particularly their marketing leadership, to look differently at what constitutes innovation, and create a culture that fosters and rewards it.

Senior management is placing increased pressure on marketers to justify their budgets, and is continually looking for the bottom-line benefit of brand-building investments. At the same time, current tracking tools offer limited value. By delving into the next generation of brand tracking, marketers can improve both business performance and ease senior management's concerns.

It's all about relationships in today's business world, and for marketers, that usually translates into a mandate to get closer to the customer to solidify the loyalty that helps drive top-and bottom-line growth.

The UN is in a brand crisis. The damage to its reputation is significant, but if the organization is committed to making some significant changes, it's not too late to change course and correct it's tainted image.

Businesses today are staggering from the weight of their brand portfolios, and there's no one easy way to lessen the burden. It takes a commitment from the corporation's upper reaches to take a fresh look at the family of brands to ensure they're all working in tandem to drive enterprise-wide business value.