Now David Acker is a Brunning veteran on pioneer and once hailed as the father of modern branding, 

David has authored no fewer than 17 books on branding and marketing, including classics, such as building strong brands, and Aaker on branding.

In 2015, he was introduced into the American marketing association hall of fame for his lifetime achievements in marketing and David opens up about 

What Brand Awareness Is And How To Achieve It 

How To Create Modern Signature Brand Stories 

And 3 Actionable Tips For Brands To Get Ahead In Modern Markets

So if you want to learn from a true legend in branding about how to strategically build brands using modern techniques, then stick around for this article.

Building Strong Brands with Modern Strategies And Stories (w/ David Aaker)

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Business Strategy vs Brand Strategy

Stephen Houraghan

Well, you were teaching strategy more so at that time from a business point of view. 

So from your perspective on your philosophy, what is the difference between business strategy and brand strategy?

David Aaker

Well, there are sort of complementary,

The brand strategy is really the face of a business strategy and a business strategy is enabled by a brand.

You can only go far with a business strategy unless you have a brand to support it. 

So they have to work together. 

The Evolution Of Branding From Marketing

Stephen Houraghan

In terms of what you said before about loyalty being so important. A lot of people would speak about awareness and an image, but really loyalty is the holy grail of branding.

Now going back, you know, 40 years the way marketing was taught in universities was tha you know, branding was this subset of marketing? 

And now it seems that the brand has become the entity and the brand now dictates so much more about the business than just the marketing side of things. 

How have you seen the evolution of branding from a subset of marketing that it once was to where it is?

David Aaker

The evolution of branding from marketing really changed everything, It’s changed business, It’s changed culture, It’s changed organizations

Brand management started in the 1930s around 1932, P&G wrote a memo saying what a brand team should do because he wanted to hire one. 

He was a brand manager for Brandon in soap or something and he wanted more people and they asked him why. 

Why he wrote a three page manual, despite the fact that Procter and gamble, you could only write one page at the time, but that same person went on to become a secretary of defense later and a president of P&G.

So it was a very successful career, but his idea was what you do is you look at data, find out weak spots in the market share trend, and you really jump in with some promotions or pricing or improve distribution to correct those problems and that was what brand management was.

Well, if you flash forward to brand equity times, it’s no longer a what’s, how are we going to.

Crack the sales, the client this week, but whether it’s, you have a time horizon 1, 2, 3 years, and you’re dealing with entirely different variables, dealing with strategic variables, you’re dealing with the composition of a product or service you’re dealing with a brand experience and so on.

So you’re in assault tied to business strategy. Now it’s not tactical or the business strategy in the past it’s the business strategies on the table and who does it changed? 

It used to be that the brand was done by several levels below the chief marketing officer, it was tactical and the chief marketing officer didn’t even pay much attention about it.

Somebody else was looking, checking the data and so on. Now the marketing has a seat at the executive table. He’s a vice president of marketing or the COO and he’s part of the executive team. 

So he’s intimately involved in strategy and he’s contributing a strategy because he has access to customer insights.

He’s got access to the market trends and to forces within the marketplace. So it’s very different and of course, the impact of perceptions on.