Book Review: Rajendra K. Srivastava and Gregory Metz Thomas,The Future of Branding

The Future of Branding covers multiple facets of branding and its prospects in the context of markets getting increasingly global, competitive, digitized and challenging. The markets nowadays are flooded with various kinds of offerings. Rajendra K. Srivastava and Gregory Metz Thomas bring together leading minds in the subject to shed light on how to leverage brands to address fresh opportunities and strengths to harness their full economic potential. The volume captures novel ideas to manifest brand management as a significant managerial practice that pervades all forms of business. It is a valuable guide for practitioners and managers involved in brand management as well as the academicians dealing with the subject as it presents most recent thoughts on the ever-changing role of a brand.

The manuscript contains 18 chapters classified into four broad sections. The first section themed Brand Strategy presents three chapters. In the first chapter, Jean-Noël Kapferer begins with brand architecture decisions relating to identification of products within a range with an objective to maximize their value and brand equity. The author deliberates on the fundamental concepts of brand management, namely, brand, brand image, corporate, mother and master brands. The chapter focuses on the parameters and market situations that guide a company to adopt an appropriate form of brand architecture with notable illustrations and charts. It is indeed worth a mention how large corporates are able to strategize to create uniqueness of their brands based on certain strongly defined innovations.

Next, V. Kumar and Bharath Rajan put forth the concept of customer value management (CVM) that enables companies to refurbish customer relationship management (CRM) programmes that enhance customer value (CV). The major constituents of CV are identified to be customer lifetime value (CLV), customer brand value (CBV) and customer referral value (CRV). The inter-linkages between CLV, CBV and CRV are demonstrated to express how these components are capable of collectively raising the CV for a firm.

The final chapter in the section contributed by Lluis Martinez-Ribes shifts the focus towards branding in retail. It touches upon the global market of private label brands as analyzed by AC Nielsen, Planet Retail and IRI. It discusses the origin, evolution and stages of retail branding and the challenges that lie ahead for retail companies’ brands in their journey to reach global consumers in terms of cultural and linguistic diversities. It concludes on a note that it makes no sense to distinguish between retail brands and supplier’s brands as they both elicit a certain awareness level and position in customers’ minds. The chapter also mentions that if all the layers in the retail branding process are well aligned and consistent, the shop becomes a place where a brand is fully lived and experienced by customers.

The second section titled Brand Building begins with a complex yet intriguing issue of naming a brand that would result in positive brand identity. Bernd Schmitt and Shi Zhang present a chapter based on consumer-focused research conducted in East Asia that is characterized by the existence of numerous languages with radically different phonological, grammatical and semantic structure. The challenge lies in establishing a brand name that can be translated into foreign language in a way that every consumer in a foreign market is able to appraise it positively. The author explore in depth the issues related to translation of brand names and the significance of linguistic factors on consumer judgments. Excellent examples are cited to explain different approaches taken by firms to address the adaptation issue of such names.

Next, Jean Yannis Suvatjis and Leslie de Chernatony have introduced the six-station model of corporate identity and with the help of qualitative and quantitative research they have tried to assess the model’s utility and applicability in detail. Kevin Lane Keller in the sixth chapter sheds light on the crucial steps that must be taken by marketers for successfully developing an optimal brand positing and strategy that maximizes potential value of a new product or service. The steps include conducting a pre-launch brand audit, codifying brand positioning, deciding on brand elements and organizing internal branding effort.

Bernd Schmitt in another chapter examines the concept and various dimensions of brand experience management as marketers worldwide realize its importance in differentiating brands in the highly competitive environment. Additionally, research has been conducted to explore whether consumers have a conception of brand experience with respect to when such experiences occur or what triggers them and the manner in which they describe the same. The author presents framework and tools to manage such experiences in an elaborate manner. Interestingly Don E. Schultz in the following chapter questions whether traditional tools used by brand managers to build successful brands are relevant in today’s highly digitized and interactive marketing scenario. Rigorous research effort supported by tables and illustrations has tried to uncover new approaches to address and reinvent brand management in today’s interactive marketplace and to make a transition into the future.

Considering not only conventional luxury categories but also certain other items and services, such as hotels and travel, the global luxury market is estimated at close to €1 trillion by the Boston Consulting Group in 2010 (Bellaiche, Mei-Pochtler & Hanisch, 2010). Vanessa M. Patrick and Henrik Hagtvedt delve into the concept of luxury in the current context that stretches beyond the traditional connotation to embrace a wide variety of product categories. Their study focuses on transformation of the luxury market and emergence of ‘new luxury’. It explores the correlates of luxury brands, its consumers, benefits and risks along with the drivers of consumer choice of such brands. Furthermore, the future areas of research on the luxury brands as to how these brands can be effectively managed with a focus on aesthetics, hedonism and psychological benefits have been discussed.

Gregory Metz Thomas in the subsequent chapter highlights the significance of building a brand trust to gain competitive advantage. Different aspects of brand trust, namely, the role, benefits and dynamics, have been put forth while the author also looks into the multidimensionality of trust with its central role in various areas of marketing. The chapter explores further to suggest a value-competency model of trust. The breach of trust incidents and their impact have been effectively dealt with the help of practical instances.

The third section Leveraging Brands starts with a chapter by Martin Roll that provides a glimpse of the branding milieu in Asia and highlights the fact that in spite of huge opportunities not many companies in the continent have been able to build resonating brands that have the capability to face competition in the global market. The chapter delineates brand-related opportunities and challenges in the emerging economies. Concise brand cases describing dominant branding strategies taken by Nokia, Unilever, Tata Motors, Costa Coffee, Lenovo, Kawasaki and Alibaba, in their quest to build global brands deserve special mention. Finally, a strategic brand leadership model is proposed based on the principal criteria that form the backbone of any iconic brand, namely, innovation, collaboration, sustainability and strategic leadership.

Jeffrey Parkhurst ponders over two classic brand programmes, namely, licensing and co-branding, which possess the power to extend brand longevity with some recent case studies highlighted in the study. These strategies are capable of leveraging a brand to create a win–win scenario for parties entering into the contract. The author succinctly deals with the basics of these two activities and the steps to optimize co-branding or licensing opportunity, namely, quantifying the brand’s opportunity space, quantifying the opportunities and risks, testing the partner relationship for validity, introducing considerations that can reduce risk and quantifying hidden value with future options.

Moving on to the thirteenth chapter, a reader finds an account on the guiding principles for brand revitalization to reverse the waning fortune of a brand. Throughout, the chapter presents instances of successful or unsuccessful brand revitalization efforts of reputed companies on the global arena. Kevin Lane Keller observes, ‘Revitalization strategies obviously involve a continuum, with a pure back-to-basics strategy at one end and pure reinvention strategy at the other. Many revitalization strategies combine the elements of both strategies.’ Subsequently, the chapter deals with tactics for a company to respond to and tackle a marketing crisis with the help of two classic examples of Johnson and Johnson (Tylenol) and EXXON.

Next, Srinivas Reddy and Anupam Jaju offer a framework of corporate brand redeployment approaches and discuss about resource redeployment motives to hypothesize the preference for a brand name. The study investigates the antecedents of corporate brand name redeployment and the impact of such redeployment after mergers and acquisitions (M&As) from the consumers’ perspective.

Finally, the book talks about Brand Performance Management in four chapters. First, Werner Reinartz deals with two facets of marketing, namely, brand management and customer management, that require different capabilities and skill sets from an organizational perspective. To make the best use of the available resources, an organization has to construe the circumstances under which it should adopt the former and therefore the go-to-market strategy would be different for each of the two approaches. The study discusses about a firm’s internal cost structure and the manner in which value is created around its products and customers that play a significant role in determining the specific position. It concludes by stating the fact that it is not parallel execution of brand management alongside customer management that yields key benefits to a company, but their close integration. Next, Jeffery Andrien, Paul Benoit and Philip C. Zerrillo meticulously review the various techniques including legal and business remedies available to a company to protect their brands. In the increasingly competitive and dynamic world, brands have become more exposed to risks than ever. The authors try to adequately develop finest practices that can be followed by managers for brand protection. These include (i) systematically valuing brands and risk assessment; (ii) ensuring that the brand philosophy permeates the whole organization and employees fully understand and support the same; (iii) ensuring that the brand promises made are fulfilled; (iv) considering the technological tools and techniques available to enhance brand protection; and (v) developing their brands in the light of the legal precedents that govern their protection along with contingency plans to prevent any disastrous brand-related incidents.

S. Cem Bahadir in another chapter stresses on another aspect of the relationship between brand and company performance, that is, value of brands in M&A cases. A study has been conducted based on a wide range of industries to determine the value of brands. In an intriguing discussion, the author through brilliant illustrations puts forth that while it is assumed that brands make up a substantial portion of the overall value, there are significant variances in the proportion of value brands account for in M&A transactions.

Rajendra K. Srivastava wraps up the manuscript with the role of brands in creating perceived value in innovations for customers. The chapter presented by him investigates the key role of brands in extracting value from or adding value to innovations while dealing with the various stages of product life cycle with the help of factual data based on eminent companies. It examines how a strong brand enables an innovative company to penetrate a market more rapidly thereby ensuring greater extraction of value from its product innovation.

The manuscript is a repertoire of research on various aspects of branding carried out in the context of current market scenario and presented in a logical and eloquent manner. The book attempts to assess how to address various brand management issues with respect to the evolving complexities in the market and the rapid change in technology to make a successful transition into the future. It is a must-read for all interested in the theme particularly the practitioners and the marketers as it assists in comprehending the significance of developing strong brand identity that influences consumer behaviour and reinforces competitive advantage for the companies. The book offers valuable insights on the various dimensions on the subject that have been dealt with brilliant examples and illustrations and is a notable contribution in the sphere of modern management.