Successful Branding for Business.

• Author: HOLTZMAN, HENRY
• Position: Review

Emotional Branding: How Successful Brands Gain the Irrational Edge

Daryl Travis

Prima Publishing Roseville, Calif. 2000; 306 pages; $27.95.

Good branding is in the mind of the beholder and poor branding is held in no one's mind. What is branding? In case you've just returned from an extensive trip to another galaxy, the term refers to carving and maintaining a niche in the market for your company or its products. There's nothing new about this except the name, which has been around for a few years, too. One example of branding that turned into a Frankenstein took place a hundred years ago.

Introduced by The Bayer Company, "aspirin" was a trademark brand name. The general safety and effectiveness of the product was so good that within a few years consumers used the name aspirin to mean any over-the-counter headache relief remedy. Not slow to capitalize on this, other drug companies brought their versions of aspirin to market. Bayer sued them, won all its battles and lost the branding war. Try as it might, Bayer could not erase the public perception that any in expensive painkiller was "aspirin."

Always on the alert for new tactics and techniques, marketers (many of whom secretly thought they understood branding) leaped eagerly onto a new branding bandwagon.

There's no doubt that some jumped aboard because it allowed them to boost their budgets while demonstrating a full spectrum of marketing skills. Still others got behind branding because it permitted them to demonstrate the power of a pure marketing play, unencumbered by that oddball group in the sales department. Then there were the 20-something CEOs of dot-coms who were willing to throw megabucks to brand whatever might be unique about their look-a-like companies.

Branding started to generate turbulence as gurus and practitioners began to argue endlessly. Author Daryl Travis has attempted to bring some sanity back to what has become a controversial topic.

On one side is the group claiming that everything a company does affects branding. They may not be totally wrong, but if they're completely right then every company has the...