The New Strategic Brand Management, 5th Edition

 

Introduction: Building the brand when the clients are empowered

There are very few strategic assets available to a company that can provide a long-lasting competitive advantage, and even then the time span of the advantage is getting shorter. Brands are one of them, along with R&D, a real consumer orientation, an efficiency culture (cost cutting), employee involvement, and the capacity to change and react rapidly. This is the mantra of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Apple and Zara.

Managers know that the best kind of loyalty is brand loyalty, not price loyalty or bargain loyalty, even though as a first step it is useful to create behavioural barriers to exit. Finally, A Ehrenberg (1972) has shown through 40 years of panel data analysis that product ...