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.

Kevin Lane Keller is the E. B. Osborn Professor of Marketing at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College. Professor Keller received his B.A. in Mathematics and Economics (with distinction in all subjects) from Cornell University in 1978, his M.S.I.A. (with emphasis in marketing) from Carnegie-Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration in 1980, and his Ph.D. in Marketing from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 1986.

Previously, Professor Keller was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he also served as the head of the marketing group. Additionally, he has been on the faculty of the Schools of Business Administration at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, been Visiting Professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management, and has two years of industry experience as Marketing Consultant for Bank of America.

Professor Keller's general area of expertise lies in consumer marketing. His specific research interest is in how understanding theories and concepts related to consumer behavior can improve advertising and branding strategies. His advertising and branding research has been published in three of the major marketing journals -- the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Consumer Research. He also sits on the Editorial Review Boards of those journals. His research has been widely-cited and has received numerous awards from organizations such as the American Marketing Association, the Marketing Science Institute, the Association for Consumer Research, and the American Psychological Association. His article, "Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity" received the 1993 Harold H. Maynard award for the Journal of Marketing article making the most significant contribution to marketing theory and thought.

Professor Keller is acknowledged as one of the international leaders in the study of integrated marketing communications and strategic brand management. He has conducted marketing seminars on those topics to top executives in a variety of forums. Actively involved with industry, he has worked on cases or projects with marketing managers for companies such as Intel, Levi-Strauss, Disney, Nike, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Kodak, Goodyear, Shell Oil, Silicon Graphics, Mayo Clinic, Wolverine Worldwide (Hush Puppies), and Beiersdorf AG (Nivea). He is currently conducting a variety of studies that address strategies to build, measure, and manage brand equity. Strategic Brand Management is his first book.