This is a ready reference that leads the way for anyone setting out to build a winning brand! Written by an acknowledged expert with 20 years of experience building world-class brands, "Brand Aid" is a day-to-day quick-reference guide that provides solutions for the 22 most pressing problems faced by brand managers. This comprehensive, practical how-to guide also gives readers 17 invaluable end-of-chapter checklists to help them assess and advance their own brand management efforts. Succinct and easy-to-read, it features exercises, formulas, case studies, proprietary research findings, and other useful tools including a template to help them do a complete brand audit. "Brand Aid" covers topics ranging from research, positioning, and advertising to brand equity management, legal issues in brand management, and creating a brand-building organization. It includes an overview of the entire brand management and marketing process, as well as in-depth discussions of brand building on the Internet and internal brand building. A treasure trove of techniques, templates, and rules of thumb, "Brand Aid!" is an indispensable roadmap for anyone responsible for building their organization's brand.
Brad is the president and founder of BrandForward, Inc. Brad brings an unequalled level of expertise in branding to his clients, leading them in the collaborative discovery process that results in strong brands. Brad gained his experience as director of brand management and marketing for Hallmark Cards, Inc. and as vice president of marketing for Element K, a leading e-learning company.
During his tenure as Hallmark's chief brand advocate, Hallmark rose to 4th in the EquiTrend national quality brand ranking and received the Brand Management of the Year award. At Element K, he moved the brand from relative obscurity in a highly fragmented market to one of the top 10 e-learning brands in the world in less than two years.
Brad's clients range from Fortune 100 and start-up companies to not-for-profit organizations and municipalities. He has helped position Bangkok, Thailand as a global fashion capital and downtown Tampa as an up-and-coming place to live in southwest Florida.
Recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on brand management and marketing, Brad is a much sought after speaker and writer. A keynote speaker at several major conferences a year, he writes extensively for the business press and academic journals and is regularly quoted in trade publications. He has been interviewed by CNN, Fox News, Investor's Business Daily and The Bloomberg Money Show.
He has been a guest lecturer at many universities including Stanford University, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, RIT, University of Rochester, University of Kansas and University of Missouri at Kansas City. In addition, he has conducted brand management and marketing workshops throughout the world, from Accra, Barcelona, Basel, Brussels, Milan, Moscow, San Juan, Toronto and Vienna to Almaty, Bangkok, Bogotá, Dubai, Kiev, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Vancouver and Zurich.
Brad has been the American Management Association's featured speaker on measuring corporate brand value. He was a member of The Conference Board's working group on Managing the Corporate Brand and APQC's Brand Building & Communication Benchmarking Study sponsor group. He chaired the IIR Brand Masters conference and the IQPC conference on Internal Brand Building. He is a founding member of the World Class Branding Association. He is a facilitator of Unilever's North American brand management and marketing planning.
He has authored two books on brand management: The Brand Management Checklist and Brand Aid, which are available throughout the world and have been translated into several languages. His books are used by several universities to teach brand management.
Brad publishes a controlled circulation newsletter to thousands of marketers throughout the world. Marketing executives from many organizations including 3M, Air Canada, Amway, Applebee's, Bank of America, Bates Worldwide, Bear Stearns, Citicorp, Dreyfus, Intel, Leo Burnett, Lucent, Maytag, McCann-Erickson, McDonalds, Microsoft, Ogilvy, Pepsi-Cola, Purina, Sam's Club, Sprint, Time Warner Cable, Unilever, Wizards of the Coast (Pokémon) and Yahoo subscribe to the newsletter. He coauthors www.BrandingStrategyInsider.com, one of the top 50 marketing blogs on the Internet with more than 15,000 subscribers and 100,000 daily readers through extensive RSS feeds.
He has assisted numerous advertising/marketing agencies develop, sell and deliver brand management capabilities.
Brad has a BS degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Brad was a member of the Advertising Council of Rochester's board of directors and won their Lantern Award. He sits on the local Boy Scout council's executive board, among several other roles in that organization. Brad serves on the marketing committees of several non-profit organizations including the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film and the Rochester Area Community Foundation. He is the immediate past president of the Writers & Books and Harvard Business School Club of Rochester boards.
