Brand Management

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 03-Feb-2006 07:59 AM
[Posted for Shahzad Khan]

I am working in a Telecom company in Pakistan as an Assistant Marketing Manager. I need to have some knowledge about Brand Management and Creative BTL activities. So can you please refer me some articles, books or web sites?

Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist
Advisory Board
Member
Picture of Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist

Posted 03-Feb-2006 11:35 AM
Hi Shazad

There is so much being written these days on brand management and brand strategy that it's difficult to know where to begin. Let me suggest a few places to start and I'll see if I can get some more detail together for you in a few days.

First, anything by David Aaker is bound to be helpful. Aaker has been a branding guru for many years and his material is always insightful. I also like a book by Scott Bedbury entitled "A New Brand World" and one by Martin Lindstrom named "Brand Sense".

You might also check out a web site on branding that I find useful—www.allaboutbranding.com.
Hope this helps for now.

Jim Barnes

Jim Barnes specializes in Customer Strategy as a member of the CRMGuru Advisory Board. For more information, please visit Barnes Marketing Associates.

Ignored post by Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist posted 03-Feb-2006 11:35 AM
Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 07-Feb-2006 01:12 PM
Shahzad

You ask a very pertinent question for telecoms companies (and other equally product-oriented) companies.

The challenge that most product-oriented companies share is a fundamental lack of interest in and insight into what makes their customers tick: What drives their customers' senses, their feelings, their thoughts and their actions. Without this interest and the insights it generates, companies are hard-pressed to develop meaningful brands or to manage customer relationships successfully.

As Tom Asacker says in his short but very insightful new book, "A Clear Eye for Branding", it is how you "feel" about a product (and the company that stands behind it) that separates a strong brand from a weak one. And traditional CRM in the guise of marketing, sales and service obviously have a big role to play in delivering products in a way that enables customers to have the right feelings about the brand.

The place where brands and customer meet are during the many touchpoints along the end-to-end customer lifecycle: That stretches from marketing communications that build awareness, through sales that sells the promise, through service that helps deliver it and on through the consumption experience where it all comes together over many years.

This is one of Aaker's messages in his work on Brand Architectures. However Michael Dunn of Prophet (where Aaker is also a Principal) describes it much better in his recent book "Building the Brand-Driven Business". This is all about experiencing the brand through the entire organisation. So is Berndt Schmidt's excellent book "Experiential Marketing" (where the sense-feel-think-act model referenced earlier came from). So is Milligan & Smiths excellent case studies of experiential brands in their recent book "Uncommon Practice: People Who Deliver a Great Brand Experience" (which includes case studies of Carphone Warehouse & Virgin amongst many others).

A good academic author who brings branding & customers together is Kevin Lane-Keller in his recent work on customer-oriented brand equity.

One last thought before we get carried away with the idea that brands, experiences and relationships are solely the result of what companies themselves do. Research by JD Power & Double Click amongst others have shown that the most influential factor in selecting a telco is personal recommendations from peers. According to Double Click's recent "Touchpoints III" survey, 22% of respondents cited it as the No 1 influencer, followed by the salesperson (17%) and the telco website (14%). TV ads accounted for only 3%, direct mail 3% and telemarketers 2%. Not exactly a good showing for telco marketers and one that should have every telco CFO demaning that the CMO justify his marketing budget. By far the best book on this topic is Ahonen & Moore's recent book "Communities Dominate Brands".

Happy reading.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant