Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity

Why are brands important? What do they mean to consumers? How can they be built? What are they worth? What should be done to manage them properly? In Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity, Kevin Lane Keller sets out to answer these and other questions by presenting the most comprehensive and detailed study of brands and brand equity to date. In his book, Keller provides unique insights into the strategies of a host of leading brands and what they are doing right and wrong. He also introduces a unique model to help anyone interested in building a strong brand or managing a mature or growing brand.

Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity describes how Procter & Gamble has boldly innovated their marketing programs, how Benetton has mismanaged their brand equity, how American Express has attempted to revitalize their brand, and how the Body Shop built a strong brand without advertising. The book also includes 5 in-depth case studies as to how to Levi-Strauss created their Dockers sub-brand, how Intel branded an ingredient, how the California Milk Processor Board branded a commodity (with "Got Milk"), how Beiersdorf manages their Nivea brand portfolio, and how Nike has built a global brand. The book also contains over 75 branding briefs that provide glimpses into the performance of leading brands such as Coca-Cola, IBM, Marlboro, General Motors, DuPont, Sears, Gillette, Kodak, Miller Brewing, Virgin, Microsoft, and the Gap, among others.

In this book, Keller develops a unique model of customer-based brand equity to provide marketers with a means to understand and interpret the potential effects of various brand strategies and tactics and assess the value of any type of brand. Keller shows how the power of a brand lies in the minds of consumers and what they have experienced and learned about the brand over time. By developing appropriate concepts, theories, and other tools, Keller's text helps marketers improve the long-term profitability of their brand strategies. Incorporating the latest thinking and developments from both academia and industry, Keller combines a comprehensive theoretical foundation with numerous techniques and practical insights for making better day-to-day and long-term brand decisions. Finely-focused on "how-to" and "why" the book contains specific tactical guidelines for building, measuring, and managing brand equity which marketers can follow to begin developing strong, successful brands.

Throughout the book, Keller offers fresh, perceptive insights into a number of important marketing topics. He outlines the three main ways to build brand equity; describes a new way of thinking about integrated marketing communications and how it affects brand equity; considers different approaches to measure brand equity and provides guidelines on how to develop a brand equity measurement system within organizations; explains how to design and implement brand strategies and when to use brand extensions; and shows how to adjust branding strategies over time and geographic boundaries to maximize brand equity.