Brand Aid or Inequality and Prosperity

Brand Aid

Author: Brad VanAuken

Written by an acknowledged expert with 20 years of experience building world-class brands, Brand Aid is a day-to-day quick-reference guide that provides solutions for the 40 most pressing problems faced by brand managers. This comprehensive, practical how-to guide also gives readers 17 invaluable end-of-chapter checklists to help them assess and advance their own brand management efforts. Succinct and easy-to-read, it features exercises, formulas, case studies, proprietary research findings, and other useful tools — including a template to help them do a complete brand audit.

Brand Aid covers topics ranging from research, positioning, and advertising to brand equity management, legal issues in brand management, and creating a brand-building organization. It includes an overview of the entire brand management and marketing process, as well as in-depth discussions of brand building on the Internet and internal brand building. A treasure trove of techniques, templates, and rules of thumb, Brand Aid! is an indispensable roadmap for anyone responsible for building their organization's brand.

Author Biography: Brad VanAuken (Honeyoye Falls, NY) is the President and founder of BrandForward, Inc. He was previously the Vice President of

Marketing at Element K, and the Director of Brand Management and Marketing at Hallmark Cards.

Quirk Marketing Research Review

My desk has been home to a bumper crop of worthwhile new books on brands and branding for the past several months?.A standout in the group is Brand Aid by Brad VanAuken, which offers an almost encyclopedic look at every step in the brand process?.Highly recommended.

Entrepreneur

It's great to have a strong brand customers love and are happy to pay a premium for, but when a brand gets overextended, underadvertised, overpriced or develops other problems, few entrepreneurs know what to do. In Brand Aid, author and marketing consultant Brad VanAuken goes a long way toward remedying these problems...[Brand Aid is] a significant addition to the brand marketing library.

MarketingSherpa.com

It's [Brand Aid] terrific. It's packed with useful research data and checklists on everything from how to write an agency brief to 22 reasons why great brands decline.

Publishers Weekly

What makes a Mercedes a Mercedes or a Coke a Coke? Popular brand names like these are more than just products. They're symbols that capture a wide range of ideas and emotions, thanks to the efforts of marketing masters like VanAuken, former director of brand management for Hallmark. VanAuken has distilled his enormous practical knowledge about the theory and practice of brand management into this smart but problematic volume. The book is packed with information and good ideas-so many, in fact, that it is virtually an encyclopedia of brand marketing dos and don'ts. Most of the material is presented as a densely compressed series of bullet points-often with 10 or more points to a page-which lack clear continuity. The result is a book composed largely of lists-easy to browse, but hard to read. This wouldn't matter if the book were truly effective as an "easy reference guide," but the lack of a technical glossary limits its usefulness in that area as well. While certainly a valuable resource for marketing professionals, this is more a collection of brilliant fragments than a practical road map for executives out to make their product a household name like IBM or McDonald's. (July 29) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
Pt. 1	Introduction to Brand Management	1
Ch. 1	The Importance of Brands	3
Ch. 2	Understanding the Language of Branding	5
Ch. 3	Brand Management Process: An Overview	15
Pt. 2	Designing the Brand	21
Ch. 4	Understanding the Consumer	23
Ch. 5	Understanding the Competition	34
Ch. 6	Brand Design	37
Ch. 7	Brand Identity Standards and Systems	61
Pt. 3	Building the Brand	75
Ch. 8	Driving the Consumer from Brand Awareness to Brand Insistence	77
Ch. 9	Brand Advertising	95
Ch. 10	Nontraditional Marketing Approaches That Work	118
Ch. 11	Brand Building on the Internet	137
Ch. 12	Developing a Brand-Building Organization	167
Ch. 13	Integrated Brand Marketing	181
Ch. 14	Creating the Total Brand Experience	185
Pt. 4	Leveraging the Brand	193
Ch. 15	Brand Extension	195
Ch. 16	Global Branding	205
Pt. 5	Brand Metrics	213
Ch. 17	Brand Research	215
Ch. 18	Brand Equity Measurement	227
Pt. 6	Other Brand Management Considerations	243
Ch. 19	How Organization Age and Size Affect Brand Management Issues	245
Ch. 20	Legal Issues in Brand Management	250
Pt. 7	Brand Management: A Summary	261
Ch. 21	Common Brand Problems	263
Ch. 22	Twenty Keys to Success in Brand Building: A Summary	271
Pt. 8	Appendixes
App. A	Brand Audits	283
App. B	Online Brand Management and Advertising Resources	291
App. C	Brand Management Quiz	296
	Index	299

Interesting textbook: Working the Room or Wealth of Ideas

Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America

Author: Jonas Pontusson

What are the relative merits of the American and European socioeconomic systems? Longstanding debates have heated up in recent years with the expansion of the European Union and increasingly sharp political and cultural differences between the United States and Europe. In Inequality and Prosperity, Jonas Pontusson provides a comparative overview of the two major models of labor markets and welfare systems in the advanced industrial world: the "liberal capitalist" system of the United States and Britain, and the "social market" capitalism of northern Europe. These two models balance concerns of efficiency and equity in fundamentally different ways. In the 1990s the much-heralded forces of globalization (together with demographic changes and attendant political pressures) seemed to threaten the very existence of the social-market economies of Europe. Were the social compacts of Sweden and Germany outmoded? Would varieties of capitalism remain possible, or were labor-market and social-welfare arrangements converging on the U.S. norm?

Pontusson opposes the notion of inevitable convergence: he believes that social-market economies can survive and indeed flourish in the contemporary world economy. He bases his argument on an enormous amount of highly specialized research on eighteen countries, using national-level data for the last thirty years. Among the areas he explores are labor-market dynamics, income distribution, employment performance, wage bargaining, firm-level performance, and the changing possibilities for the welfare state.

Author Bio:Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author of The Limits of Social Democracy, also from Cornell, and coeditor of Unions, Employers, and Central Banks.