Customer Reviews

Brand Warfare: 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

David D'Alessandro has transformed John Hancock from a clubby, play-it-safe mutual company, to a leading, publically-traded financial services group where accountability, integrity and growth are embraced. Marketing has played a critical role in the company's transformation. Unlike other life insurance companies, Hancock is led by a CEO who understands branding and embraces big ideas.

D'Alessandro's list of pioneering moves and accomplishments within the world of sports marketing and sponsorship is long and legendary. The first sponsor - and saviour - of the Boston Marathon, the first to completely rename a college football bowl game for the sponsor, the first in the insurance category to become a worldwide Olympic partner, and the first sponsor to stand up to the IOC in the midst of its bribery scandal over bribes and say: "This will not stand. Change your ways or suffer the consequences."

Anyone who wants to know brand building, communications, public relations, advertising and sports marketing from the inside out, should read Brand Warfare. Written by an acclaimed CEO and branding maverick, the book introduces D'Alessandro's "brand first" philosophy and explains why brand must always take top priority over every other business consideration.

And, unlike books written by academicians and consultants, Brand Warfare's ideas are real world and street tested. D'Alessandro engineered Hancock's double-digit growth rate at a time when many of its competitors went under.

Whether you're an experienced CEO or just starting your career, anyone in any industry will benefit from D'Alessandro's 10 principles and his "brand first" approach. Brand Warfare should become required reading for business professionals.

Mr. D'Alessandro is the CEO of John Hancock, and rose to that position after starting with the company as head of communications. The many successes that John Hancock has enjoyed certainly relate back to good brand thinking and implementation. Although the book contains many details about John Hancock's experiences, it mostly recounts examples from other companies to provide a full perspective on the difficulties of establishing and maintaining a positive brand image and awareness. My only complaints about the book are that it would have benefited from more context about how branding fits with other critical activities for corporate success and more constructive metaphors than those of warfare and competition.

Most students of marketing will scratch their heads at his list of 10 principles. Yet, I see these principles violated every day by dozens of leading companies. So, even if the rules seem obvious, it easy to go astray.

For example, "It's the brand, stupid." Despite this, few CEOs spend time measuring and understanding what is happening to image and awareness of company brands . . . must less thinking about what needs to be done. Most spend more time in 100 other areas that are mostly unrelated to brands.

Another good example is "If you want great advertising, be prepared to fight for it." I agree with his observation that many marketing executives and advertising agency people will tend to try to produce copy that will be easily accepted by company decision makers, rather than copy that will increase sales and profits. Many CEOs don't even realize how they have been maneuvered. Some don't care, like the CEO whose girl friend was in all of the company's ads. I meet CEOs who like to date the women who appear in the company's ads, so the problem hasn't disappeared.

To my mind, Mr. D'Alessandro is probably best at thinking through event-based marketing. Most companies are horrible in this area. The book is well worth its price just for the sections that explain how to select events to sponsor, how to work with the event's organizers, and how to connect to the event for maximum advantage.

The section on how you use advertising on how to create brand differentiation for relatively undifferentiated products was well done, but is probably too subtle for most to really understand. This section could probably have used some more details and examples.

John Hancock has done a great job of expanding its distribution for life insurance. I would have liked to have had more details about how the company handled the career agents to make this change acceptable to them.

If you just want to take one key idea away from this book, you should focus on the concept that everyone in the company should be constantly asking themselves before acting, "Will it help or hurt the brand?" Although the CEO has to pay attention, it's even more important that everyone else do so too.

Here are some more of the principles:

"Codependency can be beautiful." This is simply the idea that brands help customers by directing them to trustworthy suppliers, while these suppliers can more easily get customers. In a world with more and more choices, this is a more valuable relationship than ever for both sides.

"A great brand message is like a bucking bronco -- once you're on, don't let go." Company executives usually tire of campaigns long before customers do, because the executives have seen the commercials so much more often.

"Use your brand to lead your people to the promised land." This is a very thought-provoking section. He points out that the best people want to work with the best brands. The brand identity helps establish focus and discipline. A brand can also inspire people to accomplish more than they think they can (think of Wal-mart in its early days).

I was introduced to Mr. D'Alessandro more than a decade ago when he was starting to apply these principles at John Hancock. I remember clearly that he articulated the rules to me at that time. I was impressed then, and you should be too when you realize that these are things he has been thinking about and implementing for a long time. This is not just another public relations effort to buff up the image of a CEO. You are learning from one of the top practitioners.

After you have finished enjoying these interesting stories and valuable rules, I suggest that you think about yourself as a brand. What are all the impressions people have about you? How well known are you? How does this situation help or hurt what you want to accomplish? How can you use Mr. D'Alessandro's rules to help?

Then turn these same questions towards a public service activity you support.

Be a brand builder!

As a marketing professional who has spent the past decade trying to manage the ad agency, figure out what to pay for the sponsorship and preserve good creative while keeping the boss happy, I found great comfort in this book. After three short sittings, I came away from the text with the feeling that I had just had coffee with one of my MBA professors, the best marketing consultant in town and the guy who sits in the next office down. Brand Warfare offers sound advice for the toughest decisions that marketing principals have to make on a regular basis. In my opinion, the author's Rule #1 alone provides not only a solid framework for all marketing decision making, but also a mindset to live by for anyone in business. You've already found Amazon.com, now brew up some Starbucks, prop up those Nikes and enjoy Brand Warfare!

This book is good, but the experience behind it is clearly colored by managing the marketing of the John Handcock brand of life insurance products. So he talks frankly about the value of Corporate Sponsorship of Celebrities and whether it's worthwhile to try to name a sports arena after your brand.

For those of use who don't have multimillion dollar marketing budget the advice was useful, but not too much of it was simply not applicable.

Pithy style with a weak and less than engaging content worth a readers time and energy.

Felt this book on branding offers some tips but no strategic brand analyisis of any value. If you look for insight on brand and competitive advantage...I recommend any of Michael Porter's works where you get your money's worth and then some.

This book is destined to the back of my library where it will occupy a space until the next yard sale. Not only did the book offer little value, it is written by a ghost writer not the author...so I felt like entire chapters were written around cute titles - possibly an idea the author had - then written by someone else with little knowledge of branding or marketing.

Move on to Porter where your money and time are well spent. Spend your time and money wisely. This time I did not.

Will this author refund my money?

David D'Alessandro's book comes close to hitting the spot with his explanation of Branding. Although there are very useful thoughts throughout the book, most relate to spending large sums of money promoting an ideal that may not hold up in real life. Sure branding is important. Maybe more important than most executives believe. But branding can't be done in a vacuum. Branding works if the position is palatable to your target customer base. Of course D'Alessandro points out ways to obtain hints from customer clusters on what might work, but stops short of anything more helpful in figuring out this difficult feat. After reading this book I longed for more help!

Everything useful thing D'Alessandro has to say about building a killer brand could have been written in less than ten pages. About one-third of the pages are devoted to dealing with sponsorships in marketing, something few marketers spend more than a two or three percent of their marketing budgets on. (His perspective of Martha Stewart's brand says a lot for his ability to know of what he speaks-little.) If you want to learn about the power of a brand, spend your money elsewhere.

This book is a nice little autobiography but doesn't say much in terms of branding and brand building. Books by Al Ries, David Akers and the like offer much more insightful information. There was way too much self-promotion and not enough substance.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I am a business student, majoring in marketing, and find most of the books written on this subject to be full of jargon and code words that make the book sound more important than it is. That is not the case with Brand Warfare. It's is extremely engagingly written, very lucid, and full of funny stories. The book also works because Mr. D'Allesandro is a major-league character and has a remarkably dynamic outlook on the world for a guy who runs a life insurance company. I'm probably not the target audience for this book, but I found it to fun and insightful and well worth the time.

Brand Warfare is a good book, well worth reading, but the author doesn't keep his promise in the title. It is a philosophy, not a how-to-do-it lesson in brand building. He does not give us a set of rules for establishing a killer brand (as does Al Ries, for example,) but rather gives a series of war stories from his career positions wherein he sets forth certain ethical leadership principles and a few types of pitfalls to be avoided. The contents are not particularly helpful to me as a self-employed businessman, especially the stuff on advertising agency lore and sports sponsorship, but I appreciate his honesty and integrity that he manages to telegraph throughout the book, setting forth the notion that these qualities are necessary to the long-run success of a business. He certainly has been visionary in what he has done for John Hancock. The results are impressive, especially in comparison to the faltering results of other giants in the financial services industry in the Internet Age.

The ghost-writer and editor have earned their money in the production of this book. Its literary quality is head-and-shoulders superior to other big-sellers I have read on history and business topics recently. The grammar is perfect, the language is current and colloquial without slang and off-color buzz words, nothing is redundant, and I didn't notice any typos of the type that normally occur in the editing process. Attention to detail is visible on every page, which contributes greatly toward a satisfying read for a literate reader.