Brand growth is a key business challenge. Research, such as the double jeopardy revealed by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp in their follow up book, How Brands Grow Part 2, explains why big brands are and stay big: they don’t just have a larger customer base than small brands do, customers also buy them more frequently than they do small brands (‘Double Jeopardy’).
From Marriott to Amazon to Nestlé to Google to Apple to Unilever to LG to Neutrogena Source-Branded Portfolios are increasing in importance. With a shared common, source of credibility, individual brands can focus on developing and strengthening their specialness. In a highly competitive, highly fractionated, fast-paced environment, resources are better often better spent behind Source-Branded Portfolios than behind a disparate portfolio of unaffiliated brands.
Despite what you may read in the popular press and even in some academic treatises, customers are not morons who are easily fooled. Anyone who has had serious experience in sales or has sat across a negotiation table knows just how smart customers are. However, even the most experienced marketing manager and salesperson may not understand the decision making of customers. With experience as buyers, customers develop very rational and habitual decision rules. Understanding these...
The organizational scholar Sierk Ybema distinguishes between two different but familiar kinds of stories that leaders tell about the organization’s relationship with the past. In the nostalgic view, the past was a “golden age” from which the company has unfortunately strayed. Leaders and employees often take such a view to resist change and critique present-day ideas and practices.
Brand name creators specialize in finding just the right moniker for your brand. They always provide all sorts of rationalizations as to why the selected brand name is so crucially important. Some people say that the brand name is the most important, decision for effective brand management. When both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times report on brand naming on the same day, it is either a slow news day or brand...
