Summary: Brand-Leadership - David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler

Key management summary of Brand Leadership text

Avoid viewing the brand too narrowly. Instead, have a broad and rich brand identity which is aspirational.Read more at location 102

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As far as possible, always link the brand to one specific functional benefit which is compelling and expressive. Everything else should then be linked to that benefit by association.Read more at location 103

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Ignore the temptation to use too many dimensions in defining a brand. Instead, focus on just one or two key dimensions that fit and help the building of the brand identity. Ignore everything else.Read more at location 105

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Understand how competitors have positioned their brands and create a differentiated identity which takes into account whatever those competitors are doing. Understand their approach and do something different.Read more at location 109

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Wherever possible, have a single brand identity which applies across the entire range of products and in every geographic marketplace. Often, this involves having a single brand identity but emphasizing different elements in different markets.Read more at location 110

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Project the brand identity. Don’t let it become ambiguous. Be definitive in stating precisely what the brand stands for. Do this well and the brand identity will influence every decision the organization makes in the future.Read more at location 114

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Role models capture the emotion of a brand and say something about its vision. Internal role models can personalize the brand and build a heritage within the organization of actions which make up the company culture.Read more at location 117

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Visual metaphors which are aligned with the brand identity are powerful emotive devices. They can add depth and color to the way the brand is viewed. Strong visual metaphors are memorable and provide strategic direction for the brand identity.Read more at location 120

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Many brands are complex with a number of attributes, dimensions, associations and more. A good brand identity will set priorities, deciding which single attribute is most important in representing what the brand stands for. The brand identity will also help determine which legacy attributes should be maintained and which should be updated.Read more at location 122

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“In order to be communicated effectively, a brand identity needs to be punchy, memorable, focused and motivating.”Read more at location 133

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Create visibility. Brand visibility is a mix of three factors: Recognition – “Have you heard of this brand?” Awareness – “What brands do you know?” Top-of-mind status – “What do you think of?” Generally, brand builders strive for a mix of all three factors when attempting to create high visibility.Read more at location 204

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Understand customers and frame the brand in such a way it addresses factors which are central to their lives. This is the concept of “hitting them where they live”.Read more at location 215

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Rise above the clutter by having one single driving idea which resonates deeply with customers.Read more at location 216

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Reach target customers as intimately as possible. To do that, you’ll need to segment the broader market very tightly. Brand building always falters when segmentation becomes fuzzy. Delight, surprise and, if necessary, shock the customerRead more at location 219

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A good brand building organization will operate globally within a culture and organizational structure which nurtures and build the brand. That generally requires four elements: A brand champion who will oversee the long-term progress of the brand – avoiding ad-hoc decisions. An international communication system – allowing sharing of insights, ideas and best practices. A common global brand planning process. The ability to execute effective brand-building programs.Read more at location 277

Makers by Chris Anderson

A fascinating book about the movement of people making things in their own backyards and then transferring the idea into mass production through 3rd party subcontract manufacturing houses.

When you go open source, you’re giving away something in hopes of getting back more in return. Is it guaranteed? No. You also need to build a community, ensure that the initial product is needed, documented, and distinct enough for people to want to join in its development. And even then, managing an open-source community can be a full-time job in itself. But when it works, it can be magical: an R&D model that’s faster, better, and cheaper than those of some of the biggest companies in the world.Read more at location 1654

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Bill Joy, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, revealed a flaw in Coase’s model. “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” he observed, stating what has now come to be known as “Joy’s Law.” His implication: for the sake of minimizing transaction costs, we don’t work with the best people. Instead, we work with whomever our company was able to hire. Even for the best companies, that’s a woefully inefficient process.Read more at location 2141

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As I write this, the hot product at the moment at Quirky is the “Pivot Power” flexible power strip. It’s like a regular power strip, but each outlet can pivot so that bulky power adapters don’t block neighboring outlets. Designed by Jake Zein, a software programmer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it’s classic Quirky: clever, clearly solving a problem, stylishly designed, and slightly inessential. It’s the kind of thing you’d see in the store and think, “Yeah, I hate it when I can’t fit power adapters in all the power strip outlets,” admire its design, and maybe buy one. You don’t need it, but once you’ve seen it you might want it.Read more at location 2698

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As at Kickstarter, there are countdown clocks and competitions everywhere—the whole thing feels like a game. You don’t need to have any ideas of your own to participate and feel as though you’re helping create things, or at least improve them. And it suits everyone from words people (names and taglines) to visual thinkers (design). Top influencers participate in dozens of projects and can earn thousands of dollars. It can be addictive, they report.Read more at location 2716

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Unlike Kickstarter and Quirky, Etsy doesn’t try to help Makers fund or create their products. Instead, it’s simply a way to sell them, with a strong social component that comes from its focus on handmade goods and the crafting and arts communities that make them. Like eBay, Etsy offers simple ways for sellers to create their own listings and handles the payment processing. It charges twenty cents for each listing for four months, and 3.5 percent of the sale.Read more at location 2744

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MFG.com would now remain independent, with Bezos as its main investor. Today it is the world’s largest custom manufacturing marketplace. It has more than 200,000 members in fifty countries and has brokered more than $115 billion in deals so far, with an average of $3–4 billion a month today. The deals that scroll by on any given day are typically pretty prosaic stuff—injection-molded plastic enclosures, machined metal rods, fasteners, specialty cables—but they give Free an unmatched window on the world of manufacturing today.Read more at location 3114

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For a lens into the new world of open-access factories in China, just search Alibaba (in English), find some companies producing more or less what you’re looking to make, and then use instant messaging to ask them if they can manufacture what you want. Alibaba’s IM can translate between Chinese and English in real time, so each person can communicate using their native language. Typically, responses come in minutes: we can’t make that; we can make that and here’s how to order it; we already make something quite like that and here’s what it costs.Read more at location 3176

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Perhaps the best known of these are Ponoko and Shapeways. Ponoko (on whose advisory board I sit as an unpaid volunteer) started in New Zealand as a laser-cutting service, but is now global and offers laser cutting, 3-D printing, and CNC cutting.Read more at location 3223

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Similar services exist for electronics (printed circuit boards), fabrics, and even ceramics. Meanwhile, the grandfather of them all is the Lego company, whose Lego Digital Designer CAD program for kids lets them do exactly the same thing with Lego bricks, creating a design onscreen, then uploading it to the service to be turned into a custom kit that is shipped back to them, looking just like an official Lego kit. Then, if others buy it, the designer will get a cut of the revenues.Read more at location 3238

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And that’s just chemistry. What happens when the tools get powerful enough to extend to biology and genetics? Today we can amplify and identify DNA at the kitchen table. Tomorrow we will be able to sequence it, too. But after that comes synthesizing it, modifying it, and the rest of genetic engineering. The day when only a small number of professional labs can do this, checking and screening every request that comes in, will soon end. At that point, people will start hacking life. We’ve been doing that for thousands of years with cross-breeding and agricultural genetics, but that was always within the bounds of nature. But in the lab, there are fewer such bounds. And the DIYbio Movement aims to create countless new labs. Why should trained scientists have all the fun?Read more at location 3349

The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins

A bit "dumbed down" from some of his earlier work, I guess in a bid to try and win a wider audience.  He draws on various magical and miraculous stories from various texts and explains why teh simple explanation is much more plausible, and in fact all the more 'magical' in the sense of wondrous.

All peoples around the world have origin myths, to account for where they came from. Many tribal origin myths talk only about that one particular tribe – as though other tribes don’t count! In the same way, many tribes have a rule that they mustn’t kill people – but ‘people’ turns out to mean only others of your own tribe. Killing members of other tribes is just fine!Read more at location 302 •
You were once a baby. Now you are not. When you are a lot older you’ll look quite different again. Yet every day of your life, when you wake up, you are the same person as when you went to bed the previous night. A baby changes into a toddler, then into a child, then into an adolescent; then a young adult, then a middle-aged adult, then an old person. And the change happens so gradually that there never is a day when you can say, ‘This person has suddenly stopped being a baby and become a toddler.’ And later on there never comes a day when you can say, ‘This person has stopped being a child and become an adolescent.’ There’s never a day when you can say, ‘Yesterday this man was middle-aged: today he is old.’Read more at location 385 •
So, the question of who was the first person, and when they lived, doesn’t have a precise answer. It’s kind of fuzzy, like the answer to the question: When did you stop being a baby and become a toddler? At some point, probably less than a million years ago but more than a hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors were sufficiently different from us that a modern person wouldn’t have been able to breed with them if they had met.Read more at location 408 •
Next time you see an animal – any animal – or any plant, look at it and say to yourself: what I am looking at is an elaborate machine for passing on the genes that made it. I’m looking at a survival machine for genes. Next time you look in the mirror, just think: that is what you are too.Read more at location 812 •
armed with science, we can at least ask sensible, meaningful questions about it and recognize credible answers when we find them. We don’t have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.Read more at location 2229 •
Bad things happen because things happen. Whether they are bad or good from our point of view doesn’t influence how likely it is that they will happen. Some people find it hard to accept this. They’d prefer to think that sinners get their come-uppance, that virtue is rewarded. Unfortunately the universe doesn’t care what people prefer.Read more at location 2562 •
There are things that not even the best scientists of today can explain. But that doesn’t mean we should block off all investigation by resorting to phoney ‘explanations’ invoking magic or the supernatural, which don’t actually explain at all.Read more at location 2909 •
The eminent science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke summed the point up as Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford

The core message of the book is that if you are failing then you are not trying hard enough.  That you should try things out at a simple scale first and gamble on many small bets.
How professional experts are rarely worth listening to for their predictions about the future (expect in limited tightly controlled systems)
Along the way the book covers how disruptive technologies take hold and why large established business find it so hard to innovate.

Predictions about Russia from experts on Russia were no more accurate than predictions about Russia from experts on Canada.Read more at location 159

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Most accounts of Tetlock’s research savour the humbling of the professional pundits. And why not? One of Tetlock’s more delicious discoveries was that the more famous experts – those who spent a lot of time as talking heads on television – were especially incompetent.Read more at location 161

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The market has solved the problem of generating material wealth, but its secret has little to do with the profit motive or the superior savvy of the boardroom over the cabinet office. Few company bosses would care to admit it, but the market fumbles its way to success, as successful ideas take off and less successful ones die out. When we see the survivors of this process – such as Exxon, General Electric and Procter & Gamble – we shouldn’t merely see success. We should also see the long, tangled history of failure, of all of the companies and all of the ideas that didn’t make it.Read more at location 239

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Astounding complexity emerges in response to a simple process: try out a few variants on what you already have, weed out the failures,Read more at location 246

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In fact, Stuart Kauffmann and John Holland, both complexity theorists affiliated with the multidisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, have shown that the evolutionary approach is not just another way of solving complex problems. Given the likely shape of these ever-shifting landscapes, the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wild gambles is the best possible way to search for solutions.Read more at location 299

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We should not leap to conclusions based on an abstract mathematical model, but Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Apple might as well replace Steve Jobs with a dart-throwing chimpanzee – even though it would certainly liven up Apple product launches. But the evidence suggests that in a competitive environment, many corporate decisions are not successful, and corporations constantly have to cull bad ideas and search for something better.Read more at location 350

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We will have to make an uncomfortable number of mistakes, and learn from them, rather than cover them up or deny they happened, even to ourselves. This is not the way we are used to getting things done.Read more at location 369

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The Soviets failed at both: they found it impossible to tolerate a real variety of approaches to any problem; and they found it hard to decide what was working and what was not. TheRead more at location 415

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What Palchinsky realised was that most real-world problems are more complex than we think. They have a human dimension, a local dimension, and are likely to change as circumstances change. His method for dealing with this could be summarised as three ‘Palchinsky principles’: first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along. The first principle could simply be expressed as ‘variation’; the third as ‘selection’. The importance of the middle principle – survivability – is something which will become clear in chapter six, which explores the collapse of the banking system.Read more at location 442

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If we are to take the ‘variation’ part of ‘variation and selection’ seriously, uniformly high standards are not only impossible but undesirable. When a problem is unsolved or continually changing, the best way to tackle it is to experiment with many different approaches. If nobody tries anything different, we will struggle to figure out new and better ways to do anything. But if we are to accept variation, we must also accept that some of these new approaches will not work well. That is not a tempting proposition for a politician or chief executive to try to sell.Read more at location 494

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There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.Read more at location 517

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All four examples – poker, Paris, Deal or No Deal and share portfolios – show a dogged determination to avoid crystallising a loss or drawing a line under a decision we regret. That dogged determination might occasionally be helpful, but it is counterproductive in all these cases and in many others. Faced with a mistake or a loss, the right response is to acknowledge the setback and change direction. Yet our instinctive reaction is denial. That is why ‘learn from your mistakes’ is wise advice that is painfully hard to take.Read more at location 590

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The three essential steps are: to try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; to make failure survivable, because it will be common; and to make sure that you know when you’ve failed.Read more at location 604

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‘In the absence of guidance or orders, figure out what they should have been … ’ – part of a sign on a command-post door in west Baghdad, commandeered by David PetraeusRead more at location 618

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Friedrich Hayek in an article published in 1945. What Hayek realised, and Allende and Beer did not seem to, was that a complex world is full of knowledge that is localised and fleeting. Crucially, the local information is often something that local agents would prefer to use for their own purposes.Read more at location 1157

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Return on investment is simply not a useful way of thinking about new ideas and new technologies. It is impossible to estimate a percentage return on blue-sky research, and it is delusional even to try. Most new technologies fail completely. Most original ideas turn out either to be not original after all, or original for the very good reason that they are useless. And when an original idea does work, the returns can be too high to be sensibly measured.Read more at location 1329

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Grants, unlike prizes, are a powerful tool of patronage. Prizes, in contrast, are open to anyone who produces results. That makes them intrinsically threatening to the establishment.Read more at location 1715

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‘Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it.’ – Aza Raskin, designer at FirefoxRead more at location 3464

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Disruptive innovations are disruptive precisely because the new technology doesn’t appeal to the traditional customers: it is different and for their purposes, it’s inferior. But for a small niche of new customers the new disruptive product is exactly what is needed. They want smaller, cheaper hard drives, or cameras that produce digital files, or email that you can access on any computer – and they are willing to tolerate the fact that the new product is inferior to the old one along all the traditional dimensions. That foothold in the niche market gives the new technology an opportunity to develop into a true threat to the old way of doing things.Read more at location 3778

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researchers find that self-employed people tend to be happier than the employed: they receive implicit approval of what they do every time somebody pays their invoice, whereas people with regular jobs tend to receive feedback that is both less frequent and less meaningful.Read more at location 4025

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in a complex world, we’re unlikely to get it right first time. To embrace the idea of adapting in everyday life seems to be to accept blundering into a process of unremitting failure. So it’s worth remembering once again why it is worth experimenting, even though so many experiments will, indeed, end in failure. It’s because the process of correcting the mistakes can be more liberating than the mistakes themselves are crushing, even though at the time we so often feel that the reverse is true.Read more at location 4081

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