Remember the company that branded themselves medium-ly? Of course you don't. You remember brands you love, and brands you hate. And that's it. A brand is not predicated on a logo, not on marketing strategy or even advertising placement. True, digital brand strategy begins and ends with an emotional connection. DEFINITION "Brand Dominance" (n.) When such a strong emotional connection is created, that not only does an audience refer their peers, but also rallies behind the brand in pursuit of the brand's own growth. This book was born from a decade of the author's experience running ad agencies, executing revolutionary identity designs for 100's of digital entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies, and the trials and tribulations developing and growing his own personal brand and social audience. There were plenty of ups and even more downs...but always a lesson. Those lessons are shared in this book and woven to create a comprehensive guide on the do's and don'ts growing a digital audience and creating a "Disruptive Social Brand".

Communities Dominate Brands: Business and marketing challenges for the 21st century is a book about how the new phenomenon of digitally connected communities are emerging as a force to counterbalance the power of the big brands and advertising. The book explores the problems faced by branding, marketing and advertising facing multiple radical changes in this decade. Communities Dominate Brands discusses how disruptive effects of digitalisation and connectedness introduce threats and opportunities. The authors compellingly illustrate how modern consumers are forming communities and peer-groups to pool their power resulting in a dramatic revolution of how businesses interact with their customers. The book provides practical guidance of how to move from obsolete interruptive advertising to interactive engagement marketing and community based communications, with dozens of real business examples from around the world. Communities Dominate Brands addresses its topic from a marketing (including advertising and branding) perspective and maintains a rigorous focus on business and profit dimensions of the issues involved.The book discusses such recent phenomena as blogging, virtual environments, mobile phone based swarming and massively multiplayer games. The book introduces a new generation of consumers called Generation-C (for Community). The book also discusses such new concepts as the Connected Age, Reachability, the Four C's, Alpha Users, and introduces Communities as an unavoidable new element into the traditional communication model. Combining the digital trends, modern management theories, and emerging new customer behaviour, Communities Dominate Brands arrives to its conclusion, that traditional marketing methods are increasingly ineffective and even becoming counterproductive. The power of the brands and the abuses by marketing have created a vacuum for a counterbalance, and digitally connected communities, the blogosphere, gamers, and especially the always-on connectedness of those on mobile phone networks, are emerging as the counterforce to redress the balance. The power of smart mobs and digitally enlightened communities will react rapidly to marketing excesses as the natural force balancing the power of the brands.The way a business can and must interact with the powerful new communities is through engagement marketing, by enticing the communities to interact with the brands. Communities Dominate Brands covers the major changes taking place in business and industry worldwide from leading digitally connected societies such as Finland, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, UK and the USA. The authors discuss the business relevance of such community related technologies and phenomena such as blogging, CANs, iPod, MMOGs, MVNOs, PVRs, Ringing Tones, SMS text messaging, swarming, VOD. This is the definitive business book on the impact of new technologies, not explaining how technology works, but showing what businesses need to do to make money in the new digitally converging environment. Communities Dominate Brands analyses early successes of engaging communities by global brands such as Adidas, Apple, Audi, BBC, Boeing, Coca Cola, eBay, Ford, Google, Guinness, Hush Puppies, Lonely Planet, MTV, Nokia, Orange, Philips, Red Bull, Sony, Tesco, Tony & Guy, Vodafone, etc.The lessons are amplified with insights from rough punishment by communities suffered by Hutchison/Three networks, Kryptonite locks, Mazda, the Philippines Government, etc. Fully indexed, impeccably researched with documented sources, offering over 50 current business examples and over a dozen case studies, Communities Dominate Brands is a hands-on practical business handbook on how to adjust marketing to deal with communities. With tools such as the Four C's and Reachability, the authors provide a competitive head-start to all who want to achieve customer satisfaction and return business in the 21st century.

This is one of the first books to probe deeply into the art and science of branding industrial products. The book comes at a time when more industrial companies need to start using branding in a sophisticated way. It provides the concepts, the theory, and dozens of cases illustrating the successful branding of industrial goods. It offers strategies for a successful development of branding concepts for business markets and explains the benefits and the value a business, product or service provides to industrial customers. As industrial companies are turning to branding this book provides the best practices and hands-on advice for B2B brand management.

This book gathers and explains the key brand analysis tools that measure brand effectiveness and awareness along the customer journey. Rather than considering how to build and manage a brand, Brand Metrics shows students the methods by which they can assess the current market position of the brand and design effective strategies for the future. Each chapter follows the same logical and accessible structure, defining each metric and its usage, presenting the calculations, showing how the data should be interpreted, offering case studies and examples, presenting recommendations and offering questions for further discussion. The metrics covered in the book correspond with the customer journey, moving through measuring brand awareness, consideration and purchase, to customer loyalty and brand advocacy, and finally an overall analysis of the brand’s strength. The book not only shows the formula for a metric and explains how it should be interpreted, but also considers what each metric really measures, how it impacts the brand’s equity and how it is related to other metrics. As such it should be perfect recommended reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Strategic Brand Management, Marketing Planning and Strategy, Marketing and Branding Metrics.

This second edition of Brand Meaning lays out new territory for the understanding of how brands both acquire and provide meaning. The author draws on his experience with leading international companies to propose a compelling framework for the conscious and unconscious ways in which people connect with products and brands. Revised and updated, it contains contemporary as well as classic examples of brand meaning in practice from various countries, and expands on the theory, methods and applications of brand meaning. The book’s multidisciplinary approach and concise yet comprehensive content makes it an ideal supplemental reader for undergraduate, graduate, and MBA courses, as well as valuable reading for practitioners in the fields of marketing, advertising and consumer research. For more information, visit www.brandmeaning.com.

Brand management is firmly established as a core business and marketing activity. The research evidence on how consumers react to branding, however, is in constant evolution globally. This short-form book provides a comprehensive overview of research evidence on several core branding topics whilst acting as a catalyst for advancing future research and informing business practice. The book fills a gap created by prior volumes on branding that, although well- illustrated and explained, have often approached the subject in somewhat uncritical manner. The book represents a timely compendium on popular topics in branding and aims to be a valuable addition to knowledge in branding. The book focuses on reviewing research in branding and brand management, and proposes areas for expanding research in the field. Recognising the diversity of research in branding, the authors of this book, as active branding researchers, attempt to discuss the limitations of current research and provide insights for future explorations. The book will be of interest and a resource for academic researchers, branding practitioners, business students and policymakers who view branding as an evidence-oriented discipline.

A strong corporate image has power in a competitive marketplace. Its influence on reputational value and customer decision-making is only now beginning to be understood. Interest in corporate branding is exploding as marketing academics and professionals begin to realize how it can boost business performance in measurable ways. For example, it promotes customer patronage without expensive advertising and raises profitability by enabling companies to leverage their brand image when buying from particular sources. Yet there are few empirical studies available to clarify its basic tenets and fewer still that help us understand corporate branding in different parts of the world. Existing books focus mainly on conceptual ideas and real-life examples. Corporate Branding: Areas, arenas and approaches is a unique take on corporate branding that provides a global overview through rigorous research of different geographical areas across industries. An international range of leading scholars contribute their coverage across three clear themes: Area: geographical areas across the globe including the UK, USA, Europe and Asia; Arena: a variety of commercial and not-for-profit sectors, both B2B and B2C; Approach: methodological approaches to brand research design, including qualitative, quantitative, case studies, interpretivistic and social narrative. These three themes enable the reader to consider corporate branding from more perspectives and in more ways than any other corporate branding book. The result is an understanding of this strategically important, growing subject that cannot be found anywhere else. This book is an essential read for any branding student or interested professional.