BrandKnew September 2013 April 2014 | Page 43

groupisd.com 42 Defending Your Brand Power Branding Leveraging the Success of the World’s Best Brands How Smart Companies use Defensive Strategy to Deal with Competitive Attacks By Tim Calkins Competitors take any and every opportunity they can to deride and dominate their opponents in the marketplace. While all companies strive to create innovative and aggresive campaigns to make gains in the market, the smart companies - the ones that thrive - make sure to create a defense strategy that is just as strong, if not stronger, to maintain the ground when push comes to shove. Indeed, a good defense is far more important than a good offense. If you fail trying to grow, you will miss your objectives. If you fail defending your business, you can lose everything. Every one of the largest, most successful corporations were, at some point, mere startups. McKee explains what enables some companies to growbigger and better, while others stumble along year after year, running but never winning the race. The difference is that the biggest and best brands aren’t slaves to conventional marketing wisdom. McKee shows by example how the same, sometimes counter-intuitive, strategies used by the biggest brands can also best serve small and mid-sized companies. By Steve McKee Breakthrough Marketing Plans Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers Almost every company creates a marketing plan each year, and many spend hundreds of employee hours researching, preparing and presenting their tomes to senior executives. But most marketing plans are a waste of time; they are too long, too complicated and too dense. They end up sitting on a shelf, unread and unrealized. Breakthrough Marketing Plans is an essential tool for people who create marketing plans and people who review them. The book provides simple, clear frameworks that are easy to apply, and highlights why marketing plans matter, where they go wrong and how to create a powerful plan that will help build a strong, profitable business Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It’s essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world’s most exciting marketplace. How to Stop Wasting Time and Start Driving Growth By Tim Calkins By Geoffrey A. Moore Brand Together: How CoCreation Generates Innovation and Re-energizes Brands Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders A new tool for marketers and brand managers, co-creation is fast becoming a recognized and effective way to drive business growth and enhance and protect brand reputation. Brand Together shows how to involve all stakeholders employees, clients and customers - in the process of co-creation and innovation to enable the brand to succeed in the new world of customer engagement and participation. It shows how to intertwine creativity with brand strategy and provides practical guidance on how to co-create with customers from a brand perspective. It contains over 25 new interviews and case histories, two completely new chapters, introduces a new typology of 12 different kinds of Challengers, has extensive updates of the main chapters, a range of new exercises, supplies weblinks to view interviews online and offers supplementary downloadable information. By Nicholas Ind, Clare Fuller, Charles Trevail By Adam Morgan FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand for the Future Brand Relations Management: Bridging the Gap Between Brand Promise and Brand Delivery FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand for the Future by brand futurist Nick Wreden represents a fresh look at branding imperatives, especially for companies selling to other businesses. Core principles of FusionBranding are illustrated with numerous case studies. Each chapter includes a FutureView, which looks at branding in 2005 and beyond, Takeaways, in-depth questions that can help apply FusionBranding principles, and Resources that features books and Web sites about FusionBranding principles. Brand Relations Management is a book for all those interested in strategy and marketing. The primary intention is to show that both brand promise and brand delivery are necessary in order to build a sustainable brand. The book’s greatest strength is that it gathers and presents all the relevant theories of brand building. By Tony Apéria, Rolf Back By Nick Wreden