Brandscendence: Three Essential Elements of Enduring Brands [Hardcover]

Kevin Clark (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0793183030 | ISBN-13: 978-0793183036 | Publication Date: September 1, 2004

World-class commercial brands such as BMW, Coke, Disney, General Electric, and IBM, and even not-for-profit institutions such as the Red Cross, are on the journey to "brandscendence." They have enduring reasons for being yet adapt to changing circumstances and evolve over time.

In Brandscendence, author Kevin Clark uses success stories and case studies to illustrate his theory on the 3 essential elements enduring brands must manage:

1. Relevance. The organization’s or product’s enduring relevance to the customer
2. Context. The context in which the brand must adapt to cultural shifts or changing economic needs of customers over time
3. Mutual benefit. The turbocharged customer relationships that result from stakeholders’ perceived mutual benefit, which create goodwill to nurture future interactions-crucial in times of crisis

Compare and contrast BMW and the Red Cross. BMW has a recognizable phrase that captures the essence of its brand-"The Ultimate Driving Machine"-an expression about innovative personal mobility and technology leadership. The Red Cross is known around the world for providing help in emergencies and disasters to people in need without regard to borders-you might say it’s "The Ultimate Disaster Relief Experience." Both brands endure because they manage the 3 essential elements so well.

Brandscendence studies the broader role of branding and, through what Clark dubs BrandNext™, its strategic applications for the future. Chapters include industry sector analysis with exciting collaborative input from some the country’s foremost experts in business and academia who study marketing and branding.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This confused primer from IBM "brand steward" Clark insists that virtually everything, not just the commercial name of a product, is a brand. The Catholic Church is a brand. The generic category "ski resort" is a brand. Einstein, Gandhi and Mother Teresa are brands. Switzerland and the Middle East are brands, while New York City is "a web of brand holons." Clark's ideas about brands are no more focused than his definition. He relates Brandscendence (a trademarked word meaning a "brand ... that goes beyond ordinary limits") to the "elements" of Relevance, Context and Mutual benefit with the equation B = (R + C) X Mb. But rest assured that "this is not a mathematical formula or a numerical expression," just a lazy association of nebulous pseudo-concepts that Clark conflates with all manner of junk science. Brands, he theorizes, partake of wave-particle duality, tap into the Jungian collective unconscious, swirl in a "spiral dynamic" of memes and "wave-like meta-memes" and sometimes constitute a "McLuhan tetradic reversal." And if people are brands, brands are people, too; a brand goes through the stages of Piagetian child development, can suffer from depression and paranoia and may cease to "care about itself or others." Intellectual pretensions aside, Clark has little in the way of useful business lessons to impart beyond a few truisms ("creating meaningful and memorable names is one of the most important jobs ... in branding"), some disorganized anecdotes about favorite brands, and the ridiculous suggestion that the Red Cross "brand" ought to think of itself as "the ultimate humanitarian experience." Clark's premise that reality is essentially identical to its shallowest marketing representations yields few insights into either reality or marketing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Kevin A. Clark is program director for brand strategy and integrated marketing for IBM Personal Computing Devices. He is the brand steward for IBM ThinkPad notebook computers and IBM ThinkCentre desktop computers. He is also president of Content Evolution™, LLC, a content creation and strategic consulting company working with not-for-profit organizations. An established authority in his field, Clark is in demand as an international lecturer, having presented his ideas at conferences and some of the world’s foremost business schools.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Kaplan Publishing (September 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0793183030
• ISBN-13: 978-0793183036
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,325,296 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars More than a simple branding book -- high impact, September 8, 2004

By 

Jean Gadddy Wilson "author, speaker, strategist" (Missouri) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brandscendence: Three Essential Elements of Enduring Brands (Hardcover)

In a world on edge -- now comes a book deceptively simple, a personal conversation about branding. Brandscendence's meta-message: only the brand stands. In a hyper-world, the "code" of select brands live, endure and beckon us forward. Interestingly, Brandscendence can be read as a decoder. Why do certain activities in brands lift organizations to new futures? How can one person use it as a blueprint to maximize personal impact? More intriguing, as snap-communicating and globalizing speed crucial, global decisions: what if Kevin Clark's clean observations are tools internalized not just by marketers, but also by long-term thinkers and brand-makers in government, religion, business, politics, public service, education, entertainment? CREATING positive brandscendences in any of those areas could lift where 6 billion of us arrive in the poly-possible future.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Goes beyond the basics, September 8, 2004

By 

Mark McNeilly "Author: Sun Tzu and the Art of... (Cary, NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brandscendence: Three Essential Elements of Enduring Brands (Hardcover)

This book not only covers the basics of branding but goes beyond the fundamentals to look at where branding is going in the future. It's filled with many interesting examples and looks at branding and business from many different perspectives. If you want to learn both the fundamentals and then more this book is for you.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great new way to make sense of brands and branding, September 6, 2004

By 

John L. Peterson (Arlington, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brandscendence: Three Essential Elements of Enduring Brands (Hardcover)

This has got to be one of the finest tutorials - primers - that exists to fundamentally guide one through the process of developing, building, and maintaining a brand. You can find it all in one place from a world-class expert in the business of brand husbandry. If you or your company's future depends on establishing a positive, powerful image for your customers, this is the book for you. It will give you a much broader perspective of brands.