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Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands By Alina Wheeler Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley, 2003 229 pages, $35.00 (hardcover)
Studies indicate that strong brands lead to higher brand equity (Aaker and Keller 1992; Casey and Johnson 2003). It should be of no surprise then that for the past several years, the Marketing Science Institute (2002) has made brand and branding strategies a Top 10 research priority. Businesses spend billions of dollars trying to create brand identities, to have a competitive edge in the marketplace, and yet many brands fail. Noted academic Kevin Keller (2003) explains, "The high failure rate of new products is well documented. . . . Marketing analysts estimate that perhaps only 2 of 10 new products will be successful" (p. 581). We have to wonder if not having a strong brand leads to many of these product failures.
With all the attention to the topic in the literature in the last decade, one might conclude that a solution on how to create a strong brand identity would be closer at hand. Instead, it seems as practitioners/researchers, we are still unclear on how to create a strong brand identity. This is why Wheeler's book is such a timely resource book....