Beyond the Brand: Why Engaging the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business

Branding reached its zenith in the dot-com era, when as much as 90 percent of the venture capital raised by start-ups was budgeted simply to establish corporate identity and earn a spot in the public’s awareness. Since then, however, it has become increasingly clear that companies were approaching things backwards. And so the time has come to adopt a new set of objectives-to move Beyond the Brand.

Marketing expert John Winsor makes a powerful case that consumers have developed a "brand immune system" that only magnifies the problems involved with branding today. Instead of focusing on branding efforts, he explains, companies must learn to use "bottom-up" tools to co-create new products and marketing strategies with their customers. It’s about getting out in the streets and spending time with right customers in their worlds, creating essential foundations for breakthrough innovation.

While many recent titles-The Tipping Point, Crossing the Chasm, and The Idea Virus-have highlighted the importance of certain customers in the marketplace, Beyond the Brand takes readers one step further, providing case studies, as well as practical step-by-step methods to engage these key voices in a dialogue that can fuel real product and marketing innovation. Readers will learn: • The Eight Steps to develop a bottom-up strategy • How to identify and find new ways to listen to the key voices in the marketplace • How to hone intuition and find inspiration to drive innovation • How to find the company’s center of gravity The tools John Winsor outlines in Beyond the Brand are the very ones his company, Radar Communications, uses to help some of the most forward-thinking companies today to develop more aggressively, innovative growth.

John Winsor started Radar Communications in l998. His goal has been to help companies listen to and learn from the key voices in their communities by using organic, bottom-up anthro-journalistic tools to help them co-create new marketing and product development strategies. In l986, he founded Sports & Fitness Publishing, well known for being ahead of the trends, which he sold off in l998 to Condé Nast and Emap. Winsor holds an MBA from Denver University.