This is a magisterial work on brands. It is a substantially expanded and largely rewritten sequel to Jean‐Noël Kapferer's Strategic Brand Management (2nd ed., Kogan Page, London and Dover, NH, 1998), the first edition of which appeared in 1992 in French. From the first to the now third edition, which has been so thoroughly revised that the change in the title is truly warranted, the book has grown not only in volume but much more so in quality.
While perfectly useable as a textbook in classes on product management or branding, it has neither the systematic structure, nor the often sterile and scholastic style, nor the didactic ancillaries (chapter reviews, cases in inserted boxes, lists of key terms, discussion questions, etc.) of an American textbook. Though featuring numerous tables and graphs, it foregoes photos and color illustrations, which drive up textbook prices without, at least in business disciplines, adding much to the explanation of topics covered. Kapferer's book is meant for the serious reader, student, or professional, who not only wants to gain an excellent state‐of‐the‐art overview of the research and discussion on branding but also to profit from a very original approach. While integrating many findings from the expansive literature on brands, the book does not cling to them and cite research papers in every paragraph. It tells its own story.
Kapferer's book consists of an introduction and 17 chapters, which are arranged in four parts. Part I deals with strategic issues of branding. It explains the nature of brands and of brand equity, and the relations between brands, products, and companies. The central issue in branding is really the relationship between products and brands. Brands are embodied in products (including services and places) and need them as “carrier objects”; moreover, each brand requires a “flagship product” to “express its spirit” (p. 44). Kapferer also warns against seeing brands as independent, Platonic entities: “You can't build the brand without building the business” (p. 1).
Part II explains the challenges of modern markets, how brands are used for competitive advantage, how they are developed out of positioning strategies, and what is specific about retail brands. Different from the “mainstream” literature, which posits the brand image as the focus of brand management, Kapferer uses brand identity. Identity and positioning are the two essential tools of brand management, where the first specifies a brand's uniqueness and value and the second amounts to “the main difference creating preference in a specific market at a specific time” (p. 95). The identity of a brand, including its vision, values, and recognizable outward representation, are always the source of its positioning. The image of a brand, on the other hand, arises on the receiver's side, as an effect of identity and positioning (p. 98ff.). Much of brand management deals therefore with the sources and facets of brand identity, as the causes of image (and of brand equity).
Part III deals with specific issues in creating and sustaining brand equity. The principal topics are: launching brands; growing brands in mature markets; sustaining them long term; changing brands through adaptation to market conditions; extending brands and developing a complex brand architecture and multi‐brand portfolios; handling name changes and brand transfers; managing brands in declining markets; and managing global brands. In this part, some of the most interesting contributions of the book can be found, especially Kapferer's typology of branding strategies (Chapter 12). Depending on the nature of the brand‐product relationship, he distinguishes product brands, line brands, range brands, umbrella brands, source brands, and endorsing brands.
Part IV deals exclusively with brand valuation. The author explains competing methods at arriving at financial values of brand equity and then presents his own recommendations. He concludes by criticizing the methodology on which widely publicized league tables of brand values are based.
The key difference of the book is that it follows an ecological approach to understanding branding: different from much of the literature, brands are never seen as entities in and by themselves but as related to companies and to consumer behavior. If, to use philosophical parlance, brands are emergent wholes, they must emerge from something, and this ecological context is as important for understanding the identity and equity of a brand as are pure surface phenomena of brand management such as the personality of endorsers, advertising messages, logos etc. Consequently, the author maintains a healthy dose of skepticism with respect to the ability of advertising to build brands. Kapferer places branding in a cause‐effect framework and gives equal and maybe more consideration to causes than only to the phenomenology of effects. To this extent, his position differs from the “customer‐based” view that has emerged as the new “paradigm” of thinking about brands.
The book is a treasure trove of insights for marketing academics and practitioners alike. Consider the following: “One should never use the brand name as a noun, but as an adjective attached to a name, as for instance with a Volvo car, not a Volvo” (p. 10). Clearly, this rule reflects the nature of brands as branded products. Contrary to much of the recent literature, a brand must not be treated as an independent “thing‐in‐itself.” To what extent, however, it can claim ontological and not only psychological reality is a question the author leaves open.
This is exactly the greatest weakness of the book. Although the product‐brand relation is repeatedly referred to as the focal point of understanding brands, it is still not delineated in a totally clear way. If brands are embodied in products yet brands are “conditional assets” (p. 10), this would suggest that products have ontological priority. But how, then, can some brands start as concepts or ideas, at an “intangible level of meaning” (p. 62), as free‐floating entities that do not yet “hook up” to a product?
This confusion runs throughout the book. It surfaces, for example, when the author (rightly) accuses the customer‐based view of overemphasizing the intangible, emotional dimension of brands: “BMW (…) owes its strength and attraction as much to a product with special, unique performance as it does to the image of its owners that the brand conveys” (p. 448). This is most certainly true; but, one might ask, do perceived product features not elicit an image of a product that, together with other factors such as price, will influence a purchase decision? The performance of a BMW automobile, as a product feature, is certainly not at the same logical level as its brand image, yet this is what the assertion suggests. Because some basic theoretical constructs are never defined unambiguously, later definitions become circular: “a strong brand is a name that influences buyers through the value it offers and is backed by a profitable economic formula” (p. 449). Even if one concedes the genus proximum of “name”, which seems to imply exactly the idealistic view on brands that the author rightly criticizes, how can the term “profitable economic formula” be operationalized without involving brand equity and thus begging the question? In building his theory, Kapferer is very strong on strategy; he is weaker on philosophy, particularly on ontology. Might not the theories of emergence or supervenience provide more useful clues for modeling the exact relationship between brands and the products on which they depend without being reducible to them?
One of the strengths of this book is its excellent use of examples. The text should be particularly attractive to an international readership. Different from the near‐exclusive use of American‐based brands in American textbooks, the author features a more balanced portfolio of examples, which include less‐known yet highly interesting brands such as Bic, Cadbury‐Schweppes, Carrefour, Chanel, Danone, Evian, Henkel, Lacoste, L'Oréal, LVMH, Mercedes, Michelin, Mitsubishi, Nestlé, Renault, Salomon, Virgin, Volkswagen, or Yves Saint Laurent, all the while American brands such as Coca‐Cola, IBM, McDonald's, Marlboro, Nike and Dell still figure prominently.
One weakness of the book that is likely due to the editor rather than the author, is the alphabetical index. It frequently does not list names and topical terms mentioned in the text and, with its matrix structure, it makes targeted searching difficult. The book contains a few typographic errors, but overall it is graphically well produced.
