Quotes from David A. Aaker

Yogi Berra, the fabled Yankee baseball player and manager, was said to have pointed out, "If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up somewhere else." That is so true about brands; you need to know where they are to end up.

organizations feel pressure to be relevant in the digital era, stories have become a hot topic in marketing communication. Many firms have added processes and structures that enable them to find, create and evaluate strong stories. They have also added journalists and filmmakers to their staffs to present these stories in a compelling way.

A product can be copied by a competitor; a brand is unique. A product can be quickly outdated; a successful brand is timeless.

There is no long-term strategy for the brand. The following questions about the brand environment five or ten years into thefuture are unanswered, and may have not been addressed: What associations should the brand have? In what product classes shouldthe brand be competing? What mental image should the brand stimulate in the future?

Briefly, it is a set of assets such as name awareness, loyal customers, perceived quality, and associations (e.g. being "pure" and "it floats") that are linked to the brand (its name and symbol) and add (or subtract) value to the product or service being offered.

Without any clear product difference, Lever could not dislodge Ivory, and ultimately withdrew from the market.

Unlike brand-building activities, most sales promotions are easily copied. In fact, competitors must retaliate or suffer unacceptable losses.

Managing with a long-term perspective is difficult in the face of the shareholder value emphasis, and other pressures, facing U.S. managers.

we need to find measures of long-term performance to supplement or replace short-term financials, measures that will be convincing enough to satisfy shareholders.

An asset is something a firm possesses, such as a brand name or retail location, which is superior to that of the competition. A skill is something a firm does better than its competitors do, such as advertising or efficient manufacturing.

What a business does (the way it competes and where it chooses to do so) usually is easily imitated. It is more difficult to respond to what a business is, since that involves acquiring or neutralizing specialized assets or skills. Anyone can decide to distribute cereal or detergent through supermarkets, but few have the clout to do it as effectively as, say, General Mills.

The value of an established brand is in part due to the reality that it is more difficult to build brands today than it was only a few decades ago.

The marketing effort (and the effort to create and maintain equity) was diffused and uncoordinated, and lacked a budget commitment. The solution, creating a brand management team responsible for the marketing program and its coordination with sales and manufacturing, was a key event in the history of branding.

There is no person in the firm who is really charged with protecting the brand equity. Those nominally in charge of the brand,perhaps termed brand managers or product marketing managers, are in fact evaluated on the basis of short-term measures.

Most firms will focus efforts upon one brand, protecting its position by pursuing a given positioning strategy. New segments are usually therefore uncovered by competitors who are attempting to gain a position in the market.

Without question the key to the success of P&G is its commitment to the development of brand equity, the brand management system that supports it, and the ongoing investment in marketing that sustains it.

P&G is known on Wall Street as a firm which takes a long-term view of its brand profitability.

the development of brand equity can create associations that can drive market positions, persist over long time periods, and be capable of resisting aggressive competitors. However, it can also involve an initial and ongoing investment which can be substantial and will not necessarily result in short-term profits. Payoffs, when they come, can involve decades. Thus, management of brand equity is difficult, requiring patience and vision.

Branding adds spirit and a soul to what would otherwise be a robotic, automated, generic price-value proposition. If branding is ultimately about the creation of human meaning, it follows logically that it is the humans who must ultimately provide it.

A brand strategy can enable, sometimes crucially, the potential of an innovation to be realised. There are times when you literally need to brand it or lose it.