Jack Trout
Big Brands, Big Trouble
Lessons Learned the Hard Way
Wiley, 2001
Aperçu
Jack Trout isn’t just fishing. He knows how to hook consumers by baiting your brand with the perfect lure.
Recommendation
Jack Trout, head of the marketing firm Trout & Partners, digs for details about the major reasons big brands run into trouble and just how enormous companies mess up by handling their signature standard-bearers badly. He runs down the litany: mistaken extensions of the brand name, failures to differentiate the brand’s qualities and loss of clarity about just what a brand represents. His failure sagas are mini-novels based inside Xerox, General Motors, AT&T, Digital Equipment, General Mills and Coca-Cola. Remember New Coke? Now that was a branding debacle. Trout highlights corporate shortcomings and lays the blame for branding woes right at the feet of people who should have known better: of out-of-touch CEOs, ineffective consultants and dysfunctional boards. Alert consumers who like insider business war stories will enjoy this clear, lively book, but if you own a company or market a brand, getAbstract.com suspects you should read it twice.
Summary
About the Author
Jack Trout is president of Trout & Partners, a U.S. marketing firm with offices in 12 countries. Its clients include AT&T, Merrill Lynch and Southwest Airlines. Trout was one of the first marketing experts to popularize positioning products and ideas in the mind of consumers. He is a well-known speaker and the author of numerous marketing classics, including Differentiate or Die and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
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