"Harvard Business Review" on Brand Management ("Harvard Business Review" Paperback S.)

The topics covered are building brands without the use of mass media, private label strategies, growing premium brands, brand repositioning, growing with existing product lines (as opposed to extending those to cannibalise own sales and profits), how to handle moribund brands and brand strategy generally.As other books, which rely on gurus for enlightening one on a specific topic, one gets lots of soundbites, a fawning language and occasionally a breathless tone ('I am so excited about this new thing I found out that I need to share with y'all' type of thing). And deep down, there are a couple of grains of useful material, the occasional framework or concept to think about when going about working on brand strategy yourself.As always with cases, especially when presented by gurus, you do not get a sufficiently critical view, so it is generally hard to ascertain, if the example is transferable or relevant to your specific industry, and what the caveats or weaknesses of a theory are. It is useful as a discussion starter, perhaps, and definitely as reading up material for an interview for such a role (if nothing else for the managementspeak du jour).And some articles actually do attempt to put things into perspective and draw up lists of suitable and less suitable problems for the approaches advertised, even if largely based on the authors' intuition, rather than research.