Taking Brand Initiative: How Companies Can Align Strategy, Culture, and Identity Through Corporate Branding

by Mary Jo Hatch, Majken Schultz

Taking Brand Initiative offers a revolutionary approach to corporate branding that looks beyond the marketing value of brands company-to-customer and the HR significance of brands company-to-employee. It places the management of brands at the senior level of management as it radiates throughout the organization. In this groundbreaking book, international branding thought leaders, Mary Jo Hatch and Make Schultz explain how a company's brand is just as important to ÒoutsidersÓÑpoliticians, suppliers, and analysts as it is to company insiders. They show how only the corporate brand can integrate all the company's staff functions and provide a vision for competition and globalization.

Genres: Business

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 7, 2008

Reviews

[Thinh Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book for people who want to understand the dynamic between brands and their stakeholders. It could be a bit abstract at times if you are not very familiar with terms used in branding and businesses or how those concept can even work with each other. Still a good read.

[Thomas Van Til · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful for my master thesis. VCI model is discussed.

Bit outdated and they could make a stronger argument here and there.

[Lesley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book for a work-related book club, but I was not particularly interested in the subject to begin with. The writing was accessible and briskly paced, but Hatch & Schultz could really have made their entire point in about 10 pages. Each chapter felt very repetitive, and the diagrams were laughably simple. (Really? A circle with a word on it represents, you know, that word as a concept? Space filler FTW.)

Anyway, I didn't enjoy reading this, but I'm not really the book's primary audience. Nonetheless, the authors' point about the importance of integrating corporate identity on all levels is a good one. Maybe I'd recommend the first chapter and the last chapter to someone interested in corporate identity management, but otherwise I'd call this a pass.

[Eric Lyman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this one and learned a lot. It can wander in to being somewhat dry at times, but the authors did a great job grounding all of the core concepts in real world examples. It demystifys why some companies always seem to do well, while others struggle for identity, and I was intrigued to learn that it's not just a simple act of marketing. My only criticism is that I wish it offered more examples from the tech industry, which seems to have it's own culture and systems which may be apart from the corporate examples shown in this book (Nike, etc.)