Our thinking appears in marketing articles and publications around the world

Marianne Caponnetto is a case in point: Change agents can come from anywhere in the organization. At Scholastic, the leading children’s book publisher and education technology company, she’s enabling change from the boardroom after having earned her stripes driving the change imperative in sales and marketing leadership positions at DoubleClick, IBM, and Dow Jones &Co. 

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? 

Almost everything about marketing is sexy and exciting, spanning, as it does, so many interesting areas that are highly visible to the entire organization and public. Marketers manage the brand (or brands), its position, communications, and lead such popular trends as digital strategies, social media, and guerilla marketing. 

And then there’s pricing, decidedly not sexy despite being one of the most critical aspects of marketing. This is where margins are made, cash flow is generated, and businesses grow. It’s the profitability backbone of an organization. It is also the most measurable aspect of a brand, and lends itself to a plethora of analytics opportunities to make these challenges surmountable.

The point of sale is the key consumer touchpoint for many brands (especially in consumer goods) that reflects the moment of truth in a consumer’s purchasing process. A large part of marketing investment focuses on converting consumers at this critical point.

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

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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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.

Many business leaders are making important strides in transforming their marketing strategies to address changing competitive environments, emerging product and service categories, and evolving customer needs. They’re thinking in terms of solutions rather than products, stakeholders rather than customers, and redefining rather than upgrading. To be sure, these are significant advancements. Too often, however, leaders expect new marketing strategies to be successfully executed with old marketing capabilities. The fact is that great strategic plans have failed in the absence of capability shifts.