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Rating: 
Summary: To manage brand at another angle!
Review: A brand is very important to a company. It is not just a name you call the product or company. It can in fact give the overall impression of your products or company to customers that helps differentiate from its competitors. I have read several books about brand such as "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding: How to Build a Product or Service into a World-Class Brand" and "The New Guide to Identity: Wolff Olins: How to Create and Sustain Change Through Managing Identity", which are mostly about how to well use of the power of brand or how to launch the identity program. This book is also about brand identity. But it is totally different from what I have read before. Seldom book about brand will concern for the psychological factors of customers. But it does. Customers do not usually act rationally. Many factors, not just the product itself but a total sensory experience will affect them to make purchase decisions. This book talks about the management of brand identity by using aesthetics, that is, to create an overall customer impressions through visual impacts. The use of symbol, styles, themes, retail spaces and environments etc can satisfy customers' experiential needs - their aesthetic needs, which creates value to customers. All these are illustrated by many great successful cases: Absolut Vodka, Cathay Pacific Airlines, Starbucks, Nike¡K¡K Try to read this book and manage how to build brand at another angle!
Rating: 
Summary: Keys to build identity, providing the artistic dimension
Review: Brand management begins with a strategical business perspective, then engages in a marketing oriented brand plan (accompanied by psychographic studies of the consumer) to end up with artistic executions (such as labels, print ads or tv commercials). This multifunctional obligation makes a though order for those who really want to be a complete marketing manager. Companies have to accept that business schools not always prepare future managers in psychological aspects nor artistic appreciation, however these same future managers will be intented to direct marketing research, product design and brand communication. With this book, Alex Simonson and Bernd Schmitt provide a lift for those managers who want to understand these new dimensions of brand management. And, most of all, remind in the urgent need to understand that the consumer is not bound to logical and practical behaviour but rather, is always in the search for an experience, one wich will provide with a sense of good living. An acknowledgement for the authors who have managed to show in a practical format ways to integrate aesthetics to brand identity management.
Rating:
Summary: The World is Yours.
Review: Double S drops the 'marketing book' of the year. Now you tell me who won, I see them: they run. Ain't one of you got Cynko cells or somethin? Now when TP dropped the word on this book, I check it at my local library. Word is bond. It's phat. Suits best cop it, and learn from it. This is better than any stuffed up text you'll find. Clad in a MGM white T, light brown khaki's, gold around my neck, cigar in left hand, brass knuckles on my right. Cap pulled down, eyes shifty. Black Jag, dark tinted windows. Others try to copy, beat it, with a twist of my wrist, i end all existence.
Rating:
Summary: The World is Yours.
Review: Double S drops the 'marketing book' of the year. Now you tell me who won, I see them: they run. Ain't one of you got Cynko cells or somethin? Now when TP dropped the word on this book, I check it at my local library. Word is bond. It's phat. Suits best cop it, and learn from it. This is better than any stuffed up text you'll find. Clad in a MGM white T, light brown khaki's, gold around my neck, cigar in left hand, brass knuckles on my right. Cap pulled down, eyes shifty. Black Jag, dark tinted windows. Others try to copy, beat it, with a twist of my wrist, i end all existence.
Rating:
Summary: A Tour de Force that puts a new visual spin on Marketing
Review: Schmitt and Simonson have accomplished quite a feat--demystifying the dominant visual culture of the 1990s. Their book, Marketing Aesthetics, is the first scholarly text to introduce this topic as one that is to be seriously considered by anyone in business today. This book is written for the entrepreneur who wishes to understand what often separates companies with success and status from those ill-defined in their market. The authors show how aesthetics fit in the well established models of consumer behavior, market research, and communications with customers. Marketing Aesthetics' encompassing sensory considerations are to the turn of the millennium what In Search of Excellence's customer service was to the early 1980s. This book, however, should be of interest to more people than marketing majors. Sociologists, art historians, and cultural critics need this book because it gives a language to define the 1990s, and especially to explain megamalls, Disneyfication, and personal identity achieved through consumption. Schmitt and Simonson elucidate the corporate strategies that have come to define consumer experience at the end of the century. The mall culture of Victoria's Secret, The Body Shop, and Starbuck's Coffee are analyzed to show how the shops, spaces, architecture, packaging, and products, come together to create a total sensory experience for the customer and ultimately result in a purchase. Their examination of internet pages formulate how virtually anybody can create a positive presence in this medium that "levels the field" for small business.
Ultimately, this book indicates why post-modernism, simularcum, and the society of the spectacle work. As goods and services like coffee, luxury automobiles, and air travel are relatively the same in and of themselves, it has become necessary to move beyond the utility of the product, and to create meanings and associations that differentiate the company and its offerings. The examples in Marketing Aesthetics are the practical application of displaced meanings that have come to define entities, objects, and consumers.
Rating:
Summary: A Sensible Perspective
Review: The authors assert that, within a marketing context, a company must find "a powerful point of differentiation through the use of aesthetics to create positive overall customer impressions that depict the multifaceted personality of the company or brand." How? The book explains how. Substantial attention is devoted to the branding phase during which a symbol is strategically created, conveys a positioning, provides tangible value, and is most effectively managed on a daily basis. "Drivers" of identity are also explained as is the procedure for cross-functional coordination and other components of what should be a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective marketing program. During the course of Marketing Aesthetics, the authors examine a number of different products for which various companies achieve "a powerful point of (aesthetics as a strategic tool); Lucent Technologies and Continental Airlines (creating identity and image through aesthetics); IBM (corporate and brand expressions); Starbucks and Gillette (styles); Pepperidge Farm Cookies (themes); The Four Seasons (overall customer impressions); LEGO and Bosch (comprehensive identity management); Godiva and Nike (retail spaces and environments); and Volkswagen, Netscape, and Yahoo! (corporate and brand identity on the Internet). Throughout Marketing Aesthetics, the focus is on real-world corporate experience which the authors carefully examine in support of their assertion that "Business processes do not provide value to customers. Core competencies do not. Even brands per se do not. Value is provided only by satisfying needs." Moreover, "In a world in which most consumers have their basic needs satisfied, value is easily provided by satisfying customers' experiential needs -- their aesthetic needs." Marketing Aesthetics thus explains the most effective strategies for achieving both brand and identity objectives. Those who derive benefit from this book are urged to read the more recently published Experiential Marketing in which Schmitt develops even further ideas introduced in Marketing Aesthetics.
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Summary: Good, but where are the metrics? Hard definitions?
Review: The other reviews have done a fine job of outlining the many positive points for this book. It certainly does do a wonderful job of attempting to move the practice of 'brand equity' forward. Even if you don't agree with many of the ideas in the book, it's a valuable read. But I *do* have two main problems with the piece. First, by the end of the book, can anyone give a decent, concise definition of what exactly aesthetics is? Of course, it's a difficult question because much of aesthetics lies in the overall whole impression created by a brand, rather than just on packaging, advertisements, and sensory data. But one major problem I had was by about halfway through the book, 'aesthetics' had come to mean just about anything. Marketing communications? Aesthetics. Packaging? Aesthetics. All sensory information given off by a product? Aesthetics. The environment the product is sold or consumed in? Aesthetics. With a definition this loose, of *course* it's critical for marketers to pay attention to aesthetics, and of course they already do to a large degree. While the emphasis of seeing all these things as part of an interrelated whole is an admirable goal, this leads to my second problem. Second, since aesthetics is such a 'squishy/stretchy' concept, how on earth are you supposed to measure it, or know when youre doing a great job at managing it? The scenarios where a manager would make one aesthetic change, and then see quantifiable results seems rare. It would strike me as more common that aesthetic changes go hand-in-hand with strategy re-assesments and realignments. Still, even with my general reservations on the book, I can reccomend it as one of the better practicioner-focused books on branding and brand identity to come out in recent years.
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