BEYOND THE BRAND: Why Engaging the Right Customers Is Essential to Winning in Business

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. (Oct.)