Customer Reviews

Brand Babble: Sense and Nonsense About Branding

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Authors Schultz and Schultz start with a solid premise: making sense of the cacophony in the marketplace regarding branding. And while they do a reasonable job of outlining some of branding's ills and shining a light on branding's charlatans and self-proclaimed gurus, I found Brand Babble strangely unsatisfying. With a few exceptions, the authors left me hanging by explaining all that is wrong with current brand-think but failing to provide alternative answers or solutions to all the babbling. That said, I was able to extract a dozen or so nuggets of fresh thinking from the work, so it certainly wasn't a total loss.
Mike D--brandworkshops.com

(I graduated from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, but I never met the authors, who are also from Northwestern, so this is an unbiased review.) Brand Babble is one of the very best books I have read on branding (or marketing for that matter). This book was very interesting and really got me excited about the branding/marketing concepts discussed. The book is an easy read but has many important insights into advertising and branding. These are real pearls of wisdom. Anyone who is involved with branding or marketing should read this book to quickly learn how to separate the wheat from the shaft. The authors demystify one marketing/branding myth after another. If you buy this book, you won't be sorry you did. If you don't read it, you won't know how many advertising dollars you have wasted, or possibly why your branding campaign went astray.

Brands represent relationships.

Cutting through "brand babble" the authors offer solid theories and scholarly work to back their message. Brands should make money.

Brands are built, maintained and succeed because of an integrated and aligned approach on the part of both the buyer and the seller. Understand the marketing essentials and your brands will be successful. Marketing essentials, they say, include consumer behavior, communication, marketing, sociology, information technology, graphics, design, accounting and finance

The authors, two Northwestern University branding experts, define brand babble as the confusion currently filling the marketplace. This clutter often masquerades as expert branding information. Included in this are "hocus-pocus models, diagrams, geometric shapes and clever analogies."

I like this book because it offers sound, analytic advice about the value of brand marketing, communication and positioning. The authors' advice on brand tracking and budgeting will help every organization garner more value and profits from their brands.

I guess I was turned off by "Brand Babble" early in the book when Schultz and Schultz (whom I normally respect a great deal), perpetuated the myth that the Chevy Nova was a failure in Spanish-speaking countries.

Please let's get it straight: General Motors did its homework. "Nova" means the same thing in Spanish that it does in English. "No va" for "doesn't go" is extremely bad Spanish. The Chevy Nova, as it was most places, was highly successful in Spanish-speaking countries.

And interestingly, the point the Schultz's were making was how important it is to do research. Apparently, that didn't extend to themselves.

In spite of that, there's lots of good rebuttals to the standard branding malarkey. Trouble is, in my view, they never succeeded in actually defining the term "branding," and their suggestions on how to quantify a brand's value were too vague to be of use to me.

So, disappointed, but not completely negative.

Real branding happens when buyers and sellers exchange value, not just when customers are exposed to advertising. This is the notion that is at the heart of this book. Your organization's people deliver the brand experience. All your employees are, in effect, marketers.

And yet, the industry model for branding is based almost entirely on image and customer attitudes, rather than relationships with the customers. This, the author's explain is all a bunch of "brand babble." Your research needs to come from customer behavior and interaction with your company, not just their attitudes and spurious predictions about their future behavior. Sales and customers make a brand successful, not strategic maneuvering against competitors. Branding is expensive, so don't waste resources branding products and services unless they're worth it.

This book is a bit of fresh air. It could have been organized better, but the ideas here are worth the little digging you'll have to do through the text.

Marketing consultants Don and Heidi Schultz present a plain-language deconstruction of branding jargon in this guide for executives who want to understand branding and build brands. The book's strength is its simplicity and clarity. At times, however, it reads like a series of articles that once were published separately, so that certain essential information is restated - often in virtually identical language. However, we find that the information in the book is valuable, as is the authors' thoughtful approach to branding. Their book merits a read by marketers and corporate decision makers.