Brand Portfolio Strategy

Summary

In this long-awaited book from the world’s premier brand expert and author of the seminal work Building Strong Brands, David Aaker shows managers how to construct a brand portfolio strategy that will support a company’s business strategy and create relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage and clarity. Building on case studies of world-class brands such as Dell, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Dove, Intel, CitiGroup and PowerBar, Aaker demonstrates how powerful, cohesive brand strategies have enabled managers to revitalize brands, support business growth and create discipline in confused, bloated portfolios of master brands, sub-brands, endorser brands, co-brands and brand extensions.

Renowned brand guru Aaker demonstrates that assuring that each brand in the portfolio has a clear role and actively reinforces and supports the other portfolio brands will profoundly affect the firm’s profitability. Brand Portfolio Strategy is required reading not only for brand managers but for all managers with bottom-line responsibility to their shareholders.

“Brand Portfolio Strategy: Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy, Leverage, and Clarity” is available at Amazon or wherever books are sold.

Highlights

• Brands are underleveraged
• The business strategy is at risk because of inadequate brand platforms
• The business faces a relevance threat caused by emerging subcategories
• The firm’s brands are tired and bland
• Strategy is paralyzed by a lack of priority among the brands
• Brands are cluttered and confusing to both customers and employees
• The firm needs to move into the super-premium or value arenas to create margin or sales volume
• Margin pressures require points of differentiation

Endorsements

Bernhard Eggli
Head of Brand Management, UBS

“There’s no authority on branding to equal David Aaker, and here he shows again his weight of experience and keenness of insight. This is a thoughtful exploration of how to structure, manage, and extend a brand portfolio for maximum value. The passages on how to energize and differentiate a brand are especially illuminating. Excellent.”

Sam Hill
President, Helios Consulting; former Vice Chairman, DMB&B

“Brand portfolio optimization will be the value-creating management approach of the next decade, and will change the way we do business as fundamentally as has business process reengineering or six sigma. Dr. Aaker has written a simple and pragmatic guidebook that will be tremendously useful to strategists. He has almost single-handedly transformed branding from an art into a science, and no one is better qualified to lead the discussion on brand portfolio strategy.”

Anna Catalano
Group Vice President, Marketing, BP

“Aaker’s epilogue of 20 takeaways should be a bible for all brand managers who want to drive business success.”

Peter Sealey Ph.D.
Former Chief Marketing Officer, The Coca-Cola Company

“Brand Portfolio Strategy hits the mark dead center into the most relevant and hotly debated topic in marketing today. Aaker builds on his previous trilogy of seminal branding books with his best offering yet — a great strategic and practical read.”

Philip Kotler
Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

“Brand Portfolio Strategy is a ‘must’ read for any company saddled with brands whose roles and relationships go begging for clarification and wiser direction. David Aaker, our most original conceptual thinker on branding, has again pushed brand management into exciting new territory.”

About the Author

David Aaker, is the author of over one hundred articles and 18 books on marketing, business strategy and branding that have sold over one million copies. A recognized authority on branding, he has developed concepts and methods on brand building that are used by organizations around the world.

Connect

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