Our thinking is appearing in publications around the world

Insights into the rise in Executive Brand Councils and the strategic role they play in decision-making.

This executive summary outlines the main concepts from Scott Davis' book, The Shift.

The article addresses the importance of continuing to understand and manage your brand's sweet spot in order to increase likelihood of success of new products, exert more channel power and drive your companies growth.

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.

Walmart’s Stephen Quinn has it. Steve Meyer of Dell services and Cammie Dunaway of Nintendo have it, too. “It” is a P&L mind-set.  It’s a mind-set critical for senior marketers to develop or sharpen if they expect to advance from being order takers or sales supporters to enterprise-wide, visionary leaders.

For a few years now, the shiniest new toy in the digital marketplace has been the mobile app.

The proliferation has been amazing: The 1-millionth app went live as 2011 came to a close, and the pace has continued through 2012. The trend, Mobilewalla told theNew York Times, has been 15,000 mobile app releases per week.

Everyone wants to get a piece of this pie. And why not? The thing is that for all the really cool, highly successful apps there are hundreds, (thousands?) of others that are dumb, useless, or a joke.

An overview of the book Building the Brand-Driven Business.

With the recent increase in merger and acquisition activity, this article discusses how marketers in non-merging companies should use this time to reevaluate their strategies to gain competitive advantage.

This article outlines how to manage your brand touchpoints to build strong customer relationships.

A perspective on the importance of aligning your brand's touchpoints across all interactions with your customers. The article also provides some consumer products related examples.

With all the talk of the emerging role of the star CMO as a high-level strategic thinker, this article discusses what separates strategic CMOs from tactical CMOs, long-time CMOs to short-timers, and what gets the CMO a seat at the strategy table.

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.

This article features several Kellogg experts, including Scott Davis, and outlines keys to success for great global brands.

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.

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.

Too many marketers are unable or unwilling to leap beyond the data to figure out how data-driven insights can be used to drive innovation and address unmet customer needs.

In this article, Scott discusses the need for marketers to take a broader view of their role if they are to contribute successfully to business growth. This includes thoughts around owning the customer experience, successfully using new technologies, and blending business, brand, and marketing strategies.

In this article, Scott discusses the challenges being faced by Senior Marketers and four key mandates they should address on the path toward becoming empowered CMOs.

CMOs and the marketing function can expect intensifying pressure in 2005 to prove their effectiveness in aligning their strategies with how customers buy, and with broader business imperatives.