Brands in the Balance: Meeting the Challenges to Commercial Identity

By Kevin Drawbaugh

How do the heads of the world's best known companies manage their brands in a changing and volatile marketplace? Read interviews with Michael Eisner, Bernard Arnault, Patrick Ricard and Clive Butler... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0273650351
• ISBN13: 9780273650355
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Powerful Brands

(From the Department of Marketing, City University of Hong Kong)If you want to know more about what a brand delivers, you should read this book.This book introduced 8 brands for Brands in the Marketplace and Brands in the Company respectively, as well as 2 brands for Brands on the Internet and Brands in Society respectively. They all are well-known and successful brands. You can get to know how to establish these brands. Also, through the brands, the owners can convey their values, responsibilities, and commitment concerning community, environment, employees, and society to consumers.So it is not easy to build up a successful brand. And this book will explore you more about brands.

Structured insights from interviewing top execs

This is a perfect book to read on a plane - each chapter makes a clear and memorable point. The whole book is based on interviews with top execs of world class brands. Drawbaugh seems to pull out the essence of the brand's situation in a few words at the beginning of the chapter and then the issues come out in a logical order. For example he clarifies the issues Unilever is facing on selecting which of its 1600 brands to focus on. You get the inside track from the guys making the decisions at Caterpillar, Shell, Kellogg, Gucci ... If you are in brands, you'll get value from this book.

A must read

Branding is more than creating a catchy slogan or a cute logo. It's hard work and fraught with risk as Kevin Drawbaugh points out in this most readable book. His many case histories from some of the world's top companies make the concept of branding come to life. Managers looking to create, extend, nurture or revitalize a brand would be wise to add this book to their reading list. Marketers, agency creatives and students of marketing and advertising should do the same. The fascinating stories behind the brands are a bonus.

Consumer-friendly

This author has a unique ability to present technical and complex information in a very readable way. As a consumer who rarely thinks of the brands in my life except to look for them on the shelf in the grocery store, I was fascinated by the personal way each case study was presented, as if it were a story of someone I could know, not an impersonal corporation. I recommend this book to anyone who is at all curious about the world of marketing in which we are all active players. Drawbaugh writes with a light touch that makes the most technical information easy to navigate through and yet, clearly backs what he has to say with sound research.