Customize the Brand: Make it more desirable and profitable

Marketing based on averages brings average results. This is not good enough in todays intensely competitive environment.

Most companies have the potential for delivering a more powerful and relevant brand proposition. Yet it rarely happens.

In this innovative and groundbreaking book Torsten Nilson introduces the concept of the customized brand – how to effectively adapt brands, whether mass–market or niche, to the needs and wishes of individual customers.

He explains and illustrates with the help of numerous examples how companies can gain competitive advantage by adapting the total marketing mix to different customers, regardless of market sector.

One day all marketing will be like this!

This book will guide you to:
∗ Understand your customer better than anyone else
∗ Communicate better with your customer than anyone else
∗ Deliver a product or service that provides better perceived value than anyone elses

Preface.

Acknowledgements.

Introduction.

The customized brand – introducing the concept.

From the mark of a marker to a symbol of desire, and from mass–market to customization twice over.

Leading the way.

Markets fragment, communication and competition increase, less time, more uncertainty.

We are all different, but not that different – the principles of segmentation.

Find the Big Number.

The 10 steps to a customized brand.

Step 1: know the enemy and the battlefield.

Step 2: know your customers.

Step 3: know thyself.

Step 4: customizing the brand proposition – the foundation for a truly desirable brand.

Step 5: the foundation for sustainable desirability: the product/service package.

Step 6: getting into the customer′s hands.

Step 7: the price to pay.

Step 8: from ′interesting′ to ′just right for me′.

Step 9: make it move – sales promotion in a customized world.

Step 10: clinching the deal.

A better bottom line.

What does it take?

Conclusions and summary.

Index.

Torsten H. Nilson is a leading international authority on successful branding and brand development, with particular emphasis on differentiation strategies.

Torsten is a director and co–founder of The Quant. Marketing Company.

Quant. Marketing advises major national and international organizations on how to best use customer intelligence to shape and drive strong brands for better business results data–driven brand marketing.

Torstens background includes ten years as an independent international brand strategy consultant with leading blue chip organizations and prior to that ten years of senior marketing management with the Nestlé company.

Torsten is also a regular lecturer at conferences and seminars around the world.

The Quant. Marketing approach to successful marketing has been the inspiration for Customize the Brand. The book builds on Torstens highly regarded Competitive Branding: Winning in the Market Place with Value–Added Brands (published by John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0–471–98457–4).

" our new guru Nilson s book ranges over a good deal of ground " (Market Leader, Winter 2002)