Corporate-finance

I am completely enamoured with the style and content of Neumeier's new book and am recommending it to all of my clients! Having worked in the flavor and fragrance industry for my entire career I find this to be the perfect vehicle to explain one of the most powerful aspects of flavor and fragrance application in consumer products, packaging, and advertising - multi-dimensional and multi-sensory brand building! Neumeier's treatise is just too short not be read and enjoyed and applied to modern consumer product development and management! Trout and Ries; and now Neumeier to add meaning to it all! YEE haw!

I just read "The Brand Gap" and thought it a brilliant book. Marty, thanks again for sharing your thoughtful insight and elegant brevity. Straight, focused and contempory views on the theory of branding. I've already sent copies to my several of my colleague and clients.

A good book is one that not only provides an interesting read, but gets you off the dime to DO something. Our company is large (40,000 employees)and we had ahuge gap between business and brand. After reading this book, my team and I re-org'd our company around the "superteam" model of brand building. Now we have cross-deparmental collaboration, plus a stable of small, best of breed external firms to give us some creative horsepower. The left brain's finally connected to the right brain, to quote Neumeier's phrase. We use the book to introduce new hires to the brand concept, then follow up with training on our own brand. This is the book that got us going. I recommend it to anyone who wants to incite change in their organization.

...fast enough.

The Boss's Survival Guide is fairly worthless tripe. Appears to have been written by a group of tipsy Union reps. Too PC and too anti-Management to be used by any real manager.

Gonna supervise a group of tree huggers out to protest at an NRA meeting? This "book" is for you. Otherwise, don't waste your money or time.

...yet. Most of the problems this book discusses are faced by new managers who do not yet understand the intricasies of managing people and the politics of the office. No manager, regardless of experience ever fully does, but this book is not very insightful for experienced managers.

Further, the authors spend a great deal of time discussing HR issues. Those are fine and dandy, but if you don't have turn-over in your department, the recommendations on making good hires and avoiding HR pitfalls are fine, but on a day-to-day basis, they're not that useful.

The cover of the book states "Everything you need to know about getting through and getting the most out of every day". The only managers who will find this true by reading this book are HR managers.

Still, there are some useful anecdotes and suggestions but in terms of being a desktop-reference for department heads and corporate managers, this book is lacking.

Ever read a business book that stays in theory mode all the time? Drives me nuts. This book was written with the busy manager in mind. Lots of how-to's, lots of real life examples, with plenty of humor to move it right along. Very easy to read. In fact, kind of hard to put down once you start it.

Yes, this book hits the basics. My experience is that that's where most managers fall down. This book sends a strong empowerment message - "we have met the solution, and it is YOU".

Perfect book for your training or HR team to give out to all new managers. This is one of the few business books that a manager will not only read, but USE, too.

Branding is a ubiquitous, but critical marketing function that can produce spectacular successes and catastrophic blunders. Highly visible branding failures, such as the ill-fated "New Coke" or Harley Davidson's silly attempt to peddle perfume, are first-order marketing blunders. Yet, while branding is critical, one wonders if branding alone, as author Matt Haig asserts, is the main reason Land Rover sales declined and General Motors stopped making Oldsmobiles. Other experts might address such failures from a more expansive perspective, citing financial, competitive, managerial, global and environmental factors. Haig notes that non-branding mistakes contribute to failure, but focuses on branding as the prime cause. As a result, his brand-centered explanations can seem strained, but he overcomes this concern with a long list of vignettes that effectively drive home important points about the causes of branding failures. We suggest this book to marketing, advertising, PR and customer service managers so they can learn from other people's mistakes.

What we have here in this especially interesting as well as informative book is Haig's version of "the truth about the 100 biggest branding mistakes of all time." With this subtitle, Haig immediately sets himself up for lively disagreement concerning (a) the reasons for why certain brands fail and (b) his selection of the failures themselves. I value this book so highly because Haig (by assertion or implication) challenges his reader to examine her or his own current problems with branding. Frankly, his explanation of brand failure makes sense to me and all of the 100 failed brands he discusses serve seem worthy of examination. He identifies what he calls "the seven deadly sins of branding": amnesia, ego, megalomania, deception, fatigue, paranoia, and irrelevance. One or more is evident in each of the 100 brand failures on which he focuses.

Haig carefully organizes his material within ten chapters. It is easy enough for those who read this brief commentary to check out the Contents so I see no need to provide it. (Thanks Amazon!) He provides a "Lessons from...." section at the conclusion of most extended analyses. All of the usual suspects are discussed: New Coke, the Ford Edsel, Sony Betamax, McDonald's Arch DeLuxe, Campbell Soup (souper combo), Harley Davidson (perfume), Ben Gay (aspirin), Colgate (kitchen entrees). Pond's (toothpaste) in consumer products; as for dot.coms, Pets.com, VoicePod, and Excite@home. He even examines a number of PR fiascoes.

I take at least three lessons from Haig's book. First, even the largest organizations with the greatest resources (including some of the brightest people) can make bad brand decisions and sometimes repeat them with another failed attempt. Although they may be able to absorb or overcome such brand failure, almost all small organizations cannot. Second, that most brand failures result from launching a new product which encounters insufficient demand or marketing a current product for which demand is declining. Hence the importance of market research and especially of asking the customer. Ford did almost no research before introducing the Edsel nor did Coca-Cola before launching New Coke. Both line extensions were disasters. The overwhelming feedback from children surveyed indicated that they did not want Barbie's Ken to wear an earring but Mattel inserted one anyway. The third lesson is that the key to a brand's success (be it a product or service) is it authenticity. (You may prefer the word credibility.) Notice how intensively-hyped films may do well at the box office the first weekend but if they are duds, their sales tumble the following weekend and they are inevitably off the Top Ten list within a month or so, if not sooner. People are willing to try something new if they trust the provider. Lose that trust and there may never be an opportunity to re-earn it.

This is a lively, well-written, thought-provoking book. As I suggested earlier, its greatest value to each reader will be determined by what she or he has learned from Haig, and then, how much of that can be applied expeditiously and (more to the point) effectively.

I found this book extremely easy to understand and very informative. It gives you the basic undstanding of what a financial controller does and how to do it.