From Publishers Weekly
Most experts on branding emphasize how a brand owner spreads his or her message to consumers, but Winsor believes that genuine success can only come from reversing the line of communication as well. His "bottom-up" approach weds branding to customer research, but the resulting mixture is rather thin, continually circling around a handful of talking points concerning the need for a deeper relationship with customers. Companies are urged repeatedly to "find the key voices" in the market and re-center their brands on those customers in order to break through their "brand immune system," a disdain for being coerced attributed, with what feels like undue emphasis, to rising antiglobalization sentiment. Yet many of the case studies fail to provide real insight into the process, asserting that certain companies have such relationships without offering enough detail on how they established them. And though he touts the Internet as an effective tool for listening to consumers, Winsor offers examples that feel already dated. A closing chapter full of generalizations about "Millennial" youth reinforces the impression that the book reads like a client prospectus, and the "anthrojournalism" he touts as a key research methodology comes off as cool hunting under a new name, despite all protestations.
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Book Description
Branding reached its zenith in the dot-com era, when as much as 90 percent of the venture capital raised by start-ups was budgeted simply to establish corporate identity and earn a spot in the public’s awareness. Since then, however, it has become increasingly clear that companies were approaching things backwards. And so the time has come to adopt a new set of objectives-to move Beyond the Brand.
Marketing expert John Winsor makes a powerful case that consumers have developed a "brand immune system" that only magnifies the problems involved with branding today. Instead of focusing on branding efforts, he explains, companies must learn to use "bottom-up" tools to co-create new products and marketing strategies with their customers. It’s about getting out in the streets and spending time with right customers in their worlds, creating essential foundations for breakthrough innovation.
While many recent titles-The Tipping Point, Crossing the Chasm, and The Idea Virus-have highlighted the importance of certain customers in the marketplace, Beyond the Brand takes readers one step further, providing case studies, as well as practical step-by-step methods to engage these key voices in a dialogue that can fuel real product and marketing innovation. Readers will learn: • The Eight Steps to develop a bottom-up strategy • How to identify and find new ways to listen to the key voices in the marketplace • How to hone intuition and find inspiration to drive innovation • How to find the company’s center of gravity The tools John Winsor outlines in Beyond the Brand are the very ones his company, Radar Communications, uses to help some of the most forward-thinking companies today to develop more aggressively, innovative growth.
