Aaker on Branding: The Playbook to Building Strong Brands

Introduction:

WHY THIS BOOK?

I am excited to create an updated and compact way to access the key concepts, issues, and processes from my nine branding books, articles, and blog posts. In fact, that was the original impetus for writing Aaker on Branding, which was published in 2014. At that time, I had six branding books covering 1850 pages, which was overwhelming to readers. I was frequently asked to identify one or two books to read or to identify what parts of what books were most helpful. The ultimate answer was Aaker on Branding, which provided an overall introduction to the branding highlights in my writings.

The six books that preceded the first edition of Aaker on Branding were Managing Brand Equity, Building Strong Brands, Brand Leadership (with Erich Joachimsthaler), Brand Portfolio Strategy, Brand Relevance, and Spanning Silos. Three post-2014 books have been added: Creating Signature Stories, Owning Game Changing Subcategories, and The Future of Purpose Driven Branding. Now, at more than 2,400 pages, these nine books are even more overwhelming, and the revision to Aaker on Branding is even more useful.

THE BOOK OBJECTIVES

There are three book objectives besides providing a vehicle to access and update the best of my books and writings.

Branding concepts and practices. The first is to provide a highly compact presentation of the most useful branding concepts and practices. These principles provide a broad understanding of brands, brand strategy, brand portfolios, brand building, and the role that branding plays in disruptive innovation strategies. This exposition of branding principles should be helpful for marketing and brand strategists who would like a refresh and those who lack a background in branding and would like to get up to speed quickly. They are all adapted to an environment that is more digital, dynamic, and socially aware than ever.

Road to strong brands. A second objective is to provide a roadmap to the creation, enhancement, and leverage of strong brands in the digital era with all the market dynamics that come with it. What are the needed steps in the process? One is to establish a brand vision and the brand pillars that differentiate and resonate, implement that vision, and keep a brand strong in the face of aggressive competitors and dynamic markets. Another is to bring the brand to life with breakout programs in the face of media clutter and skeptical audiences. Still another is to manage the brand portfolio effectively. Portfolio goals should include delivering relevance, synergy, clarity, agility, and strong brand platforms that can be leveraged into new product markets.

The 5Bs. The third is to introduce the concept of the 5Bs—brand equity, brand relevance, brand image, brand loyalty, and brand portfolio—as a foundation of modern branding. The 5B term is a mnemonic to identify the five fundamental keys to create a set of strong brands that will enable an organizational strategy to succeed and provide the ability to adapt to future challenges and opportunities. Importantly, they are not the same as they were even a decade ago. The digital world and fast-moving markets fueled by disruptive innovation have meant that each of the 5Bs has adapted to a changing set of perspectives and methods.

What is new? A lot has happened since Aaker on Branding was first written. In addition to three books, I have posted over 200 blogs and published eight or so articles during the subsequent eleven years. Markets and strategies have become more dynamic and fueled by big data and analytics, the IoT (Internet of Things), more frequent disruption innovation, AI, and the emergence of efforts to address societal challenges. It was time for a major revision with new perspectives.

The material is updated with new case studies, intriguing empirical findings, and valuable new concepts. In particular, the section on brand portfolio, a rare treatment of this subject, is updated with recent case examples. Seven new chapters reflect issues, concepts, and tools that are especially relevant in today’s marketplace. They describe:

The concept of owned brand assets, reflected by the 5Bs, that are stored and accessed to support strategies in an environment that is more digital, dynamic, and socially aware than ever. Particular emphasis is placed on the power of branded differentiators, branded energizers, and branded sources of credibility (termed silver bullet brands).

Signature social programs that energize, differentiate, and engage. The business brand is enhanced, and the social program gets focus, visibility, funding, and ongoing support. It is a win-win.

The role of branding in making a disruptive innovation defined by must haves successful by positioning the new subcategory and building barriers to prevent competitors from becoming relevant.

Nine brand-building actions that work, four of which are discussed in one chapter—branded energizers, getting the proper brand equity measures, mobilizing employees, and learning from role models. Each of the subsequent five has its chapter, including the following three that are new to the book.

Signature stories that break through information overload, cluttered media, and skeptical audiences.

Taglines and symbols, which can be powerful in helping the audience understand and remember the brand message.

Brand communities that deliver self-expressive and social benefits while representing an ultimate level of engagement and loyalty.

THE FLOW

Here is how I divided the book thematically:

Part I: The 5Bs—recognize that brands are assets with strategic value. The breakthrough idea that changed marketing—brands are strategic assets, platforms that create ongoing value for the organization. Thus, building brand equity is strategic, unlike tactical efforts to stimulate sales. The 5Bs framework structures branding by highlighting five fundamental branding concepts, all challenged by the fast-changing market environment

Part II. Have a compelling brand vision that guides, differentiates, and inspires. A brand vision should go beyond functional benefits to consider organizational values, a higher purpose, brand personality, branded differentiators, and emotional, social, and self-expressive benefits.

Part III. Look for disruptive innovations. With rare exceptions, the only way to grow is to create must-haves that define new subcategories. Branding is key in positioning the subcategory and building barriers to keep competitors less relevant or irrelevant.

Part IV. Bring the brand vision to life. See nine brand-building actions that work, such as generating and managing branded energizers, mobilizing employees, using the right success measures, finding role models, using signature stories, finding great taglines and symbols, creating brand communities, maintaining relevance, and protecting consistency.

Part V. Manage and leverage the brand portfolio. Create a strategy that identifies brand roles (such as strategic brands or endorser brands), leverage the brand into new product arenas, analyze the risks and options of vertical brand extensions.

Part VI. Manage organizational silos. Encourage communication and cooperation.

A NOTE ON BRANDING

What is a brand? Far more than a name and logo, it is an organization’s promise to a customer to deliver what the brand stands for, not only in terms of functional benefits but also emotional, self-expressive, and social benefits. But a brand is more than delivering on a promise. It is also a journey, an evolving relationship based on a customer’s perceptions and experiences whenever he or she connects to the brand.

Brands are powerful. They serve as the core of a customer relationship, a platform for strategic options, and a force that affects financials, including stock return. Consider the most compelling brands and their brand essences. UBS has Craft is our business to illustrate its passion and competence. Harley-Davidson provides self-expressive benefits associated with freedom, adventures, and American values. Singapore Airlines, with its exceptional service, Mercedes, for those who appreciate the best, and Patagonia, which wins on sustainability, all stand out. The strength of these brands has led to customer loyalty, business success, resilience despite product problems, and the basis for moving into new products or markets.

Brands aid communication. They provide a vehicle to help gain attention, process information, change perceptions, create a context, remember, and precipitate action. It is hard to be effective in communicating anything that is not branded.

Additionally, brands and brand strategies are simply fun and engaging. Often, a CEO allocated half an hour to a brand strategy session and ended up staying for hours, affirming on their way out that the session was the most fun time working in months. It is fascinating to know what brand positions succeed, what brand-building programs get traction, how a brand can be successfully leveraged into new markets, and so on. The creativity and diversity in brand strategy can be an endless source of conversation.

Branding is complex and idiosyncratic. It is not easy to develop and maintain brand equity. Nor is it easy to manage a brand portfolio and ensure relevance, synergy, clarity, and strong brands emerge. However, a strong brand set that enables and energizes strategies is central to success.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Like my other brand books, this book has a higher purpose. It is intended to advance the theory of branding and the practice of brand management. At the center is a drive to build strategic brand assets that will provide the platforms for future success as a counterweight to the dominance of short-term financials. This book will hopefully play a role in that quest.

PART I

Recognize That Brands Are Assets

Chapter 1

THE 5BS: BRANDS ARE ASSETS THAT DRIVE STRATEGY

A brand is the face of a business strategy.

Prophet dictum

An explosive idea emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s: brands are assets and drive business strategy and performance. The era of brand equity arrived.

Conceiving of brands as assets started a dramatic and far-reaching cascade of change. It altered perceptions of marketing and brand management, how brands are managed and measured, and the role of marketing executives. Let us set up the context.

A BIT OF HISTORY

Brand equity as a strategic asset was partly propelled by the failure of two strategic beliefs, both based on data-driven analytics.

The first was the concept that market share was the driver of strategic success based on the empirical fact that there was a strong relationship between share size and profitability in the same category. The conceptual foundation was the BCG growth-share matrix, first proposed in 1970, which posited the strategic desirability of having a high market share in growth markets partly because of cost advantages from economies of experience and scale. Following this theory, business units bought market share with price reductions and cheaper products. As a result, brands were adversely affected, growth was elusive, and profits suffered. It turned out that the larger share business also had better management and a loyal customer base, neither of which came with a buy-share strategy. A 1985 academic study by Bob Jacobson and I demonstrated empirically that truth was hardly enough to change executive thought patterns.¹

The second was a belief that real-time scanning data had unlocked the mystery of managing marketing budgets. It became possible to run experiments in which different appeals could be compared. Scientific marketing had arrived. These experiments showed that price promotions such as 20 percent off were the best way to generate sales. The natural outcome was a huge spurt in price promotions which taught consumers that price was the most important consideration in any brand decision and if an item was not on sale, postpone the purchase for a few weeks. As a result, brand differentiation and brand loyalty fell, and so did growth prospects and profitability. Brands like Kraft took years to recover their brand equity and rebuild the loyalty of their customer base.

So, it is not surprising that a critical mass of executives came to believe that sustainable top-line growth and profitability were imperative and that brand assets were critical to achieving that goal. Buying sales or market share at any cost with any method did not work. Strong brands that differentiated from alternatives and resonated with customers were needed. Without that support, a sustainable growth strategy was all but doomed.

All effective growth paths clearly needed support from strong brands. One such path requires developing a new brand or adapting an existing one to create an innovative new offering. Another, extending an existing master brand into new products or value or super-premium segments, was viable only if the necessary brand assets could be developed or leveraged. Still, another, reenergizing an existing business was all about branding.

Enter brand equity. The concept of brands-as-assets emerged as a central strategic idea that gave voice to a different strategic direction. Momentum was added by an influential 1988 brand conference hosted by the Marketing Science Institute (MSI), a consortium of firms that both funds and guides academic research. After this conference, brand equity research was elevated to the top academic research priority. As a result, academic research in brand extension decisions, quantifying the impact of brands on financial performance, refining relevant tools such as brand personality and attitudes, and conceptualizing brand equity was accelerated.

It was a perfect storm of multiple forces, enabling an idea to get traction. The surge of interest and organizational change did not immediately impact all industries and firms. Many firms were slow to join the parade, particularly those in which marketing strengths were not in evidence and/or those that were highly decentralized. In addition to buying into the message, one barrier was the uncertainty of what exactly brand equity was and how it could be built. However, the willingness of firms to adopt the brand-as-asset view and, as significantly, their ability to implement the new perspective has grown steadily over time, proving this is not some management fad.

The implications were and are extraordinary.

FROM TACTICAL TO STRATEGIC

More history. One paradigm, once dominant, posits brand management as tactical, and the P&G brand management system is its bible. It was a rainy Friday morning in mid-May 1931 when the 28-year-old Neil McElroy, the advertising manager of P&G’s Camay soap (who later became a P&G CEO and, still later, the Secretary of Defense), sat down at his Royal typewriter and wrote a three-page memo on what the two staff people, brandmen, he had requested would do. That memo globally became the accepted approach to brand management for over half a century. In essence, identify where the brand has sales weakness and institute a fix, for example, a promotion, a price change, or extra advertising from an agency.

The P&G brand management model was highly tactical. The focus was on problems detected by short-term sales data. The response could be partly delegated to an advertising manager or agency because it was mostly about managing the image, running more ads, tweaking a distribution strategy, developing sales promotions, supporting the sales force, getting displays right, adjusting pricing, and other such tasks.

From tactical to strategic. When brands are considered assets, the role of brand management and the job description radically change from tactical and reactive to strategic and visionary. A strategic brand vision linked to both current and future business strategies that provide a guidepost for future offerings and marketing programs becomes imperative. Brand management also becomes broader, encompassing issues like strategic market insights, segmentation strategies, value propositions, customer trends, the stimulation of big innovations, growth strategies, brand portfolio strategies, and global brand strategies.

The brand-as-asset view also becomes relevant to defining and activating the organization’s culture. The brand’s role is to generate understanding and motivation within the organization so that employees and partners believe and live the brand and its promise.

The status of marketing. This logic means that marketing now sits at the executive table, participating in creating and managing the business strategy. Titles such as CMO, VP-Marketing, and, more recently, Chief Growth Officers became common. The elevation of brands and brand building as a driver of business strategy provides a point of entry into strategy formation for the marketing team. Once in place, marketing has much to offer to business strategy development because of its strategic customer and market focus.

FOCUS ON BRAND EQUITY—THE 5BS

Modern branding and brand-building fundamentals can be captured in the intertwined 5Bs, a branding framework introduced in a 2025 Management and Business Review article.² The first of the 5Bs is brand equity, owned brand assets that support existing and new organizational strategies and generate ongoing value.

Brand equity is similar to a financial portfolio in that it is an owned, stored asset. However, it differs in that its use can enhance and not deplete the assets, and the components are not as independent of each other as stocks and bonds. Brand equity represents the central idea that brands are strategic assets that drive an organization’s health and growth. A big idea in the history of branding.

Brand equity resides in three of the remaining four Bs—Brand Relevance, Brand Image, and Brand Loyalty. The brands in the Brand Portfolio, the final B, serve to support and enhance relevance, image, and loyalty.

Each of the 5 Bs represents assets owned by the brand, affecting customers’ perceptions and decisions and motivating or inspiring employees and other stakeholders. Understanding each of the 5Bs in-depth and making each work effectively is the key to excellence in branding. Figure 1 summarizes.

The 5Bs branding framework provides structure and guidance to those who aspire to build or enhance brands in several ways.

First, the framework, summarized in Figure 1, defines the scope of branding as consisting of five components, each of which is well-defined and has a clear role. The framework’s mission is to conceptualize branding, guiding those who aspire to build or enhance brands. One message—branding is not just about awareness and image. In particular:

Brand relevance means that the brand is both visible and credible for the context at hand. High awareness is not enough. To be considered, the awareness has to be relevant to the context, whether it be an electric car or a hospital. It also needs to be credible; there cannot be any reasons not to buy or use it.

Brand image, guided by a brand vision, represents the brand associations that should strive to intrigue, resonate, and, most importantly, differentiate.

Brand loyalty represents the ongoing asset value of repeat customers based on brand relationships, brand engagement, and customer experiences.

Brand portfolio reflects the often-overlooked fact that a strong brand is almost always either the captain or a member of a brand team. That team can include an endorser brand, subbrands, co-brands and, importantly, branded differentiators, branded energizers, branded sources of credibility, called silver bullet (or secret sauce) brands. Most strong brands have a team of brands behind them. They do not have to do it alone.

Brand equity is an umbrella asset that needs to be linked to a current or proposed organizational strategy. Those leading the brand strategy also need to manage the brand’s integration of the 5Bs and guard against tactical programs that could damage the brand.

Second, the 5Bs framework signifies that building strong brands is about activating all the 5Bs in a coordinated, even integrated matter. There is enormous potential synergy available that can be comprised if the five individual components are resourced and managed out of organizational silos that act independently. Neglecting one of the components will risk the others because if it weakens, the whole 5Bs group will suffer. Or if one component surges, it will lift the others. Relevance will benefit from the other supportive brands in the brand portfolio and energy from image enhancement programs. An enhanced brand image will be compelling only when brand relevance is high and will have a higher payoff if brand loyalty programs are healthy. Brand equity wins internally and externally when all the other 4Bs are resonating. When 5Bs work together, they can achieve consistency, differentiation, relevance, energy, and synergy,

Third, the 5Bs framework reflects the need for organizations facing dynamic times and marketplaces to create brands that are agile strategically and tactically. Disruptive innovation is much more frequent and impactful, digital (e-commerce, social media, IofT, and AI) affects branding in many ways, big data and analytics are again raising the appeal of short-term demand marketing, skepticism is widespread, information overload inhibits communication, social/sustainable is now a strategic variable, and strategies are changing. In this context, there is a premium on the ability to innovate and adapt brands and brand