Strategic Brand Management by Kevin Lane Keller, 4th Edition

Book Preface

WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT?

This book deals with brands—why they are important, what they represent to consumers, and what firms should do to manage them properly. As many business executives correctly recognize, perhaps one of the most valuable assets a firm has are the brands it has invested in and developed over time. Although competitors can often duplicate manufacturing processes and factory designs, it’s not so easy to reproduce strongly held beliefs and attitudes established in the minds of consumers. The difficulty and expense of introducing new products, however, puts more pressure than ever on firms to skillfully launch their new products as well as manage their existing brands.

Although brands may represent invaluable intangible assets, creating and nurturing a strong brand poses considerable challenges. Fortunately, the concept of brand equity—the main focus of this book—can provide marketers with valuable perspective and a common denominator to interpret the potential effects and trade-offs of various strategies and tactics for their brands. Think of brand equity as the marketing effects uniquely attributable to the brand. In a practical sense, brand equity is the added value a product accrues as a result of past investments in the marketing activity for the brand. It’s the bridge between what happened to the brand in the past and what should happen to it in the future.

The chief purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of the subjects of brands, brand equity, and strategic brand management—the design and implementation of marketing programs and activities to build, measure, and manage brand equity. One of the book’s important goals is to provide managers with concepts and techniques to improve the longterm profitability of their brand strategies. We’ll incorporate current thinking and developments on these topics from both academics and industry participants, and combine a comprehensive theoretical foundation with enough practical insights to assist managers in their day-to-day and long-term brand decisions. And we’ll draw on illustrative examples and case studies of brands marketed in the United States and all over the world.

Specifically, we’ll provide insights into how to create profitable brand strategies by building, measuring, and managing brand equity. We address three important questions:

1. How can we create brand equity?
2. How can we measure brand equity?
3. How can we sustain brand equity to expand business opportunities? Readers will learn:
• The role of brands, the concept of brand equity, and the advantages of creating strong brands
• The three main ways to build brand equity by properly choosing brand elements, designing marketing programs and activities, and leveraging secondary associations
• Different approaches to measuring brand equity, and how to implement a brand equity measurement system
• Alternative branding strategies and how to design a brand architecture strategy and devise brand hierarchies and brand portfolios
• The role of corporate brands, family brands, individual brands, modifiers, and how to combine them into sub-brands
• How to adjust branding strategies over time and across geographic boundaries to maximize brand equity