Build it ... and they'll come. Nope, not necessarily, not anymore. It's a crowded, crazy market out there, and no matter how fabulous your product or service, there's bound to be someone else delivering something pretty close. The solution? Take your product or service and ... brand it! Though the idea has been around in management circles since the late 1980s, brand equity has never been more important than it is now. In Brand Leadership, David Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler set out to guide managers to the next level of the brand revolution. Building and managing brands, though obviously vital and necessary steps in the process, do not make up the whole picture of the successful development of a brand. What is needed is strategic brand leadership. Implementing this kind of leadership, Aaker and Joachimsthaler insist, requires a radical shift in an organization's culture, its structure, and its systems. In their densely packed but accessible book, they outline what this shift is all about, and discuss the important components of brand leadership: defining and elaborating a brand identity; designing the brand's architecture to achieve clarity, synergy, and leverage; building a brand beyond the obvious route of advertising by incorporating such aspects as sponsorship and the role of the Internet; and organizing the entire company around global brand leadership as opposed to merely the creation of a global brand. To support and demonstrate their ideas, the aut