Beloved Brands has everything you need to run your brand.
With this brand management book, you will learn how to think strategically, define your brand with a positioning statement and a brand idea, write a brand plan everyone can follow, inspire smart and creative marketing execution and analyze the performance of your brand through a deep-dive business review. I wrote this as the ideal book for brand managers. Keep this handy, as you will use it over and over to do your job.
The ideal book for brand managers.
Whether you are a VP, CMO, director, brand manager or just starting your marketing career, I promise you will learn how to realize your full potential. You could be in brand management working for an organization or an owner-operator managing a branded business. Beloved Brands is a book for brand managers, and provides a toolbox intended to help you every day in your job.
Beloved Brands is the playbook to keep at your fingertips
Our readers tell us they reach for Beloved Brands a few times each week as a reference toolkit to help them with the day-to-day management of their brand.
- To start, we will challenge you with questions that get you to think differently about your brand strategy.
- Then, we take you through our process for defining your brand positioning. We will open your mind to new possibilities for how you see you can differentiate your brand. And, we use examples of brand positioning statements to bring the learning to life.
- Next, we will show you how to write a brand plan that everyone can follow. Make sure all stakeholders know precisely how they can contribute to your brand’s success.
- Moreover, we will show you how to run the creative execution process, show you how to write an inspiring brief, and make decisions to find both smart and breakthrough work.
- Finally, you will learn new methods to analyze the performance of your brand with a deep-dive business review.
Above all, over 90% of our Amazon reviews receive five-star ratings, and Beloved Brands has spent numerous weeks as a #1 bestseller in brand management.
Keep our brand book on your desk as a reference for how to manage your brand
Refer to it whenever you need to write a brand plan. Or, create a brand idea. Bring it out to develop a creative brief. Or, make advertising decisions. Use it to lead a deep-dive business review. You can even pass on the tools to your team. Learn how to deliver the fundamentals needed for your brands.
This brand management book is also an excellent resource for marketing professors. Use it as an in-class marketing textbook to develop future marketers. It will challenge communications agency professionals, who are looking to get better at managing brands. It works for those who work in advertising, public relations, in-store marketing, digital advertising or event marketing.
If you are an entrepreneur who has a great product and wants to turn it into a brand, you can use this book as a playbook. These tips will help you take full advantage of branding and marketing. As a result, you will make your brand more powerful and more profitable.
What others are saying about the new marketing book, Beloved Brands
“Graham Robertson hits all the right notes in his new branding book, Beloved Brands, a brand management book that every CMO or would-be CMO should read.”
Al Ries – bestselling author of “Positioning” and “Marketing Warfare”
“Beloved Brands is the definitive, must-read, toolkit for brand building! Graham Robertson has produced a straightforward resource for anyone who wants meaningful distance from the competition, greater customer engagement, increased brand loyalty, or more customer referrals! Because “top of mind” awareness isn’t enough for brands today, Beloved Brands will help you become “top of heart” with your customers. What are you waiting for? Drop this book into your shopping cart!”
Joseph Michelli – New York Times #1 bestselling author of books like Driven to Delight, The Starbucks Experience, and The New Gold Standard.
“Most books on branding are really for the MARCOM crowd. They sound good but you find it’s all fluff when you try to take it from words to actions. THIS BOOK IS DIFFERENT! Graham does a wonderful job laying out the steps in clear language and goes beyond advertising and social media to show how branding relates to all aspects of GENERAL as well as marketing management. Make no mistake: there is a strong theoretical foundation for all he says…but he spares you the buzzwords. Next year my students will all be using this book.”
Kenneth B. (Ken) Wong, The Distinguished Professor of Marketing & Business Strategy, S.J. Smith School of Business, Queen’s University
“Whether you’re an aspiring marketer trying to elevate your brand, or an established leader looking to separate your organization from the competition – Beloved Brands is an absolute “must-have” resource. Graham Robertson masterfully articulates the essence of effective brand marketing through a series of practical concepts. The man relevant examples transcend products, services, and industries. While many books focus on the task of marketing, Robertson’s work is rooted in something much more holistic. It’s about creating better brands by creating better brand leaders.”
Keith A. Gordon, President & CEO of Fight For Children, Inc., and former President of NFL Players Incorporated
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A look inside at the Beloved Brands chapter summaries
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Introduction: How this Beloved Brands playbook can work for you
The purpose of this brand management book is to make you a smarter brand leader so your brand can win in the market. You will learn how to think strategically. Define your brand with a positioning statement and a brand idea. Write a brand plan everyone can follow. Inspire smart and creative marketing execution. Be able to analyze the performance of your brand through a deep-dive business review. Essentially, this is an ideal book for those running a brand.
1. Why being a beloved brand matters
The more loved your brand, the more powerful and profitable your brand will be. While old-school marketers were yelling their message to every consumer, today’s brand leaders must build relationships and create a bond with their most cherished consumers. We will explore the concept of a brand idea, showing how it helps connect with consumers and organize everything you do on your brand. Indeed, an overview of the brand love curve will steer your strategic thinking and your execution decisions.
2. How to use strategic thinking to help your brand win
Strategic Thinking is the foundation our brand management book. I will take you through the five elements of smart strategic thinking, including setting a vision, investing in a strategic program that focuses on an identified opportunity, and how to leverage a breakthrough market impact into a performance result. I will show how to turn smart thinking into strategic objective statements you can use in your Brand Plans. To illustrate, I will set up the four types of strategy, looking at your brand’s core strength, consumers, competitors and looking the situation.
3. How to build your brand around your core strength
Our core strength model forces you to select one of four possible options as your brand’s lead strength: the product, brand story, experience, or price. Each choice has a distinct strategic focus, brand communications, and desired reputation. I will show how the model comes to life with numerous brand examples. To illustrate, we use a case study on Starbucks on how they built a reputation around their commitment to exceptional consumer experience.
4. How to build a tight bond with your most cherished consumers
Consumer strategy is about building a bond with your target consumer. I use the brand love curve to demonstrate specific game plans for each stage of the curve, whether your brand is at the unknown, indifferent, like it, love it or the beloved stage. This model sets up 20 potential strategies. To illustrate, our case study on Special K shows how they evolved from an indifferent brand to a beloved brand.
5. How to win the competitive battle for your consumer’s heart
Competitive strategy leverages your brand positioning to win in the market. Brands must evolve their strategy as they move from a craft brand to a disruptor brand to a challenger brand all the way up to the dominant power player. Most importantly, the four choices offers a different target focus, unique strategies, and tactics.
6. How to address your brand situation before you make your next move
Before initiating your plan, you must understand what is happening internally, within your own company. Essentially, you can learn four distinct situations, including fueling the momentum, fix it, re-alignment or a start-up. Each has different indicators and recommended strategies, as well as advice on the leadership style to engage.
7. How to define the ideal target market to build your brand around
Everything must start with the consumer target you will serve. Most importantly, I will show how to develop a consumer profile that includes a segmented definition, consumer insights, consumer enemies, need states and the desired response that matches your overall strategy.
8. How to define your brand positioning to help your brand win
You will learn the four elements of a brand positioning statement including the target you serve, the category you play in, the space you serve that will help you win, and deal-closing support points. The best positioning balances functional and emotional benefits. As a result, you will access a tool to choose from more than 100 benefits.
9. How to create a brand idea you can build everything around
To become a successful and beloved brand, you need a Brand Idea that is interesting, simple, unique, inspiring, motivating and own-able. Essentially, I will introduce a tool to help build your Brand Idea, and how to build a winning Brand Concept.
10. How to use your brand idea to organize everything you do
Use the brand idea to organize everything you do around five consumer touch-points, including the brand promise, brand story, innovation, purchase moment and the consumer experience. The brand idea should organize your brand positioning, advertising, media, product innovation, selling, retailing and the consumer experience. Indeed, you will learn how to build a brand credo and brand story, and learn from Ritz-Carlton and Apple case studies.
11. How to build a brand plan everyone can follow
Use a one-page format to simplify and organize your brand plan, so everyone in your organization can follow it with ease. Most importantly, you will learn how to find your brand vision, purpose, key issues, strategies, execution tactics, and measurements.
12. How to build your brand’s execution plans
Once you draft your brand plan, it’s time to build separate execution plans with crystal clear strategies for those who will execute on your brand’s behalf. Essentially, I will show how to complete a brand communication plan, execution plan, and sales plan.
13. How to write a creative brief to set up brilliant execution
The bridge between your brand plan and marketing execution is the creative brief. I will show how to write a world-class brief using a recommended format. Moreover, we will review smart and bad examples of a brief, broken out on a line-by-line basis. I also introduce a mini-brief for when you are time-pressed.
14. How to run your brand’s advertising process
I will take you through the 10 steps to inspiring greatness from those experts you engage. In this brand management book, I will introduce a predictive model that measures branded breakthrough and a motivating message to consumers.
15. How to make advertising decisions using our ABC’s model
This section outlines principles for achieving Attention, Brand link, Communication, and Stickiness—the model I call the ABC’s. For instance, I will show examples of some of the best ads in the history of branding, to support those principles. Essentially, I hope it will challenge your thinking about your brand’s advertising.
16. How to make media decisions to break through the cluttered media world
Six questions help you frame your media plan. Most importantly, we go through the factors to consider include your brand’s budget size, your brand’s core strength and how tightly connected your brand is with consumers. Then identify which point on the consumer journey you wish to impact, where your consumers are most willing to engage your message and what media choices best fit with your creative execution.
17. How to conduct a deep-dive business review to uncover brand issues
My brand management book includes a deep-dive forces you to take a 360-degree view of your brand by looking into the marketplace, consumers, channels, competitors, and the brands. You will learn some of the best analytical tools, including consumer tracking, customer scorecards, brand funnels, and the leaky bucket. Essentially, I provide the 50 best analytical questions to get you started, and a format for how to bring it all together into a business review presentation.
18. Brand Finance 101 to help manage your brand’s profitability
What is a brand management book without a marketing finance 101? You will learn what you need to know about brand finance, including the eight ways you can drive profit. Learn how to dissect an income statement. Moreover, we show how to use the key formulas you need to know including return on investment (ROI), growth, forecasting, cost of goods sold (COGS), and compound annual growth rate (CAGR).