Dr. Deborah J. MacInnis is the Charles L. and Ramona I. Hilliard Professor of Business Administration and a professor of marketing at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. She received a BS in psychology from Smith College in 1980 and a PhD in marketing from the University of Pittsburgh in 1986. She is theory development editor at the Journal of Marketing, and formerly served as coeditor of the Journal of Consumer Research and associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology. She formerly served as treasurer, and president, of the Association for Consumer Research, and is a former vice president of conferences and research for the American Marketing Association’s Academic Council. She has received the Journal of Marketing’s Alpha Kappa Psi Award and its Maynard Award for papers that make the greatest contribution to marketing thought, and the Long-Term Contribution Award from the Review of Marketing Research. Professor MacInnis is coauthor of a leading textbook on consumer behavior (with Wayne Hoyer and Rik Pieters) and coeditor of several volumes on branding (with C. Whan Park and Joseph Priester). She has also served as vice dean of research and strategy and vice dean of the undergraduate program at the Marshall School of Business. She is the winner of local and national teaching awards and is the recipient of USC’s Mentoring Award. She is a member of the American Marketing Association and the Association for Consumer Research. Professor MacInnis’s research focuses on emotions and branding.
Dr. Andreas B. Eisingerich is the academic programme director of the full-time MBA and professor of marketing at Imperial College Business School, Imperial College, London. He received a BSc degree in management, with a focus on economics, quantitative methods, and psychology, from the London School of Economics in 2003, and a research master’s degree (MPhil in management with a focus on marketing) from the University of Cambridge in 2004, where he also earned a PhD in marketing in 2006. He publishes widely in leading academic and practitioner journals, including the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Service Research, and Harvard Business Review, among others. Professor Eisingerich’s work focuses on consumer behavior, brand management, and service innovation, and includes collaborations with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UNAIDS, WHO, WWF, and numerous businesses across industries and markets.
Foreword
There are hundreds of books on the market about branding. Almost all talk about how to make your brand more relevant to customers, and maybe gain their trust. But what if there was an overarching framework that could be used to understand how a brand can systematically create value – and ensure that value endures – for both a company and its customers? Researchers C. Whan Park, Deborah J. MacInnis, and Andreas B. Eisingerich have recently introduced such a framework in their book, Brand Admiration: Building a Business People Love.
In this breakthrough, integrative, actionable, and research-based book, Professors C. Whan Park, Deborah J. MacInnis, and Andreas B. Eisingerich provide a fresh perspective on branding. The fundamental takeaway is that brand admiration is the ultimate destination point for brands.
Think about a few well-known brands: Nike, Apple, Disney, Google, and Salesforce. What do they have in common? Yes, they’re well-known brands with good products or services. But their enduring success can be attributed to the fact that they are admired.
Admired brands are those that customers love, trust, and respect – so much so that they feel some kind of personal connection to the brand. The brand is the first one people think about when they need something in the brand’s product category. Customers not only buy an admired brand, they speak well of it (even if they pay a little more for it), and they’ll be more forgiving when the brand screws up. Making your brand trusted, loved, and respected is critical, because these psychological states exponentially impact how loyal customers will be toward your brand and how much they’ll advocate on its behalf.
These customer behaviors create enormous value for companies in the form of increased profits, better employee retention, opportunities for partnerships, and more. From the authors’ perspective, a brand is more than a mere name that helps to differentiate products or services. It is a value-generating entity relevant to both customers and the brand owner – and the effort required to create an admired brand is worth its weight in gold.
Park, MacInnis, and Eisingerich not only clarify what brand admiration is, they show why every member of the organization should be intent on creating it. And they clarify what marketers can do to make their brand admired and keep it so. Specifically, the most admired brands provide benefits that underlie human happiness: they enable, entice, and enrich customers. This theory is rooted in sound marketing concepts, as well as established psychological theories of human motivations, goals, and needs. In light of the evolving nature of the competitive marketplace, marketers need to not just create, but also sustain brand admiration over time. A sound and actionable set of value-enhancement strategies will give you great insight into how you can continue to best your own brand and outshine competitors.
The authors also make clear recommendations for how marketers can leverage an admired brand through the strategic use of product and brand extensions. In this way, admired brands not only become more profitable, they are also more likely to provide avenues for continued growth.
As part of their integrative framework, Park, MacInnis, and Eisingerich have also developed a measure of brand equity that can help brand managers and CMOs show the worth of the brand (and of brand investments) to CFOs. Brand managers can also use the dashboard metrics the authors developed to diagnose whether there are any canaries in the coal mine, and if there are, what to do next.
What’s more, their framework applies to brands in any type of business and across industries – from B2B and B2C to tech, commodities, celebrities, institutions, nonprofit organizations, and more. It can be applied to new or existing brands with equal success. B2B brands in particular have much to gain by considering this brand admiration perspective. Everyone can learn from this book.
MarketingProfs is so keen on the concept of brand admiration that it has become a focal part of our corporate training program. What we like about this book is that it’s not based on fluff or purely on stories. The authors are world-renowned academics who have studied branding for decades. They use their own research and that of other thought leaders in marketing to build their integrative framework. We have yet to see a framework that offers so many new ideas and so much stimulating, action-oriented thinking in a single book.
Allen Weiss
CEO/Founder
MarketingProfs, LLC
Preface: What Makes This Book Different?
The business world does not lack for books on branding. But Brand Admiration is different in several game-changing ways.
First, we develop a novel, integrated and overarching perspective on the fundamental goals of brand management and how we achieve them. We call this perspective the brand admiration management system. This system (Figure P.1) provides a road map for building, strengthening, and leveraging brand admiration over time, in ways that produce value to customers and companies alike. We regard brand admiration as the most desired state of a brand’s health. Unlike other books that primarily provide a set of to do’s, we provide an overarching system whose components are connected and integrated. In this way, our book offers the theoretical coherence that makes its set of “to do’s” highly compelling.
Figure P.1 The Brand Admiration