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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