Branded Male: Marketing to Men Review

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Branded Male: Marketing to Men ReviewI have to admit, I'm one of those tough sells Mark Tungate writes about in BRANDED MALE: MARKETING TO MEN. I hate shopping and see it only as an evil necessity. I don't buy trendy, and I hate the whole corporate look because I'll never look like the models that parade around in that attire.
Women have a rougher go of it than men do because our society pushes them into constant upgrades. Men tend to roll along stuck at whatever pinnacle they reached shortly after graduating high school. Generally men buy clothes when they gain weight (of course, the clothes are SHRINKING in the dryer), ruin a favorite shirt, or run out of necessities like tee shirts, socks, and underwear due to attrition. Most men have shirts that have birthdays and anniversaries.
Tungate addresses all these issues in a much more elegant manner than I have here, but I think I've summed up his approach. While shopping for clothing or toiletries is a social experience for most women, giving them the chance to catch up on life stories as well as get a supporting vote for a new and daring purchase, men don't gather like that. I've seen men gather to buy shotguns, and generally they go for a two for one to buy a his and his, bass boats, or golf equipment. Even that doesn't require accompaniment, though. Guys just get together after the initial purchase and ogle each others' goods.
I approached Tungate's BRANDED MALE: MARKETING TO MEN with more curiosity than interest. I like to speculate on what markets are going to open up and how advertisers are going to address them. Being a self-employed novelist, I pay a lot of attention to emerging technology, consumer paradigm shifts, and marketing.
Tungate's tour de force covers clothing, cosmestics, grooming, cars, periodicals and books (which offered me some insights I hadn't considered before and found very interesting), and sex. I thought most of it seemed Euro-centric to a degree, or maybe East Coast here in the United States, but it was intensely readable.
I love history, and Tungate brings a lot of history into the book that I didn't expect. I found the marketing aspect interesting, but I was more taken with the history that he delivers. These manifested as brief snippets laced throughout the text that anchored the points he made and allowed me to better understand what he was saying. I'll bet most readers that pick this book up will experience the same thing.
I actually planned to allow myself time to read a chapter a day, basically covering each of the topics Tungate proposes. Instead, I was sucked in by the writing and compelled to keep turning pages. I hadn't expected to be as captivated by the subject as I was (after all, I am male and we have short attention spans and tend not to over think dress and style).
As a novelist by trade, I found a lot of information in the book that I plan on using in my writing. I know I've read a good book when it finds a place on my shelf (and I've got limited space at this point). BRANDED MALE: MARKETING TO MEN is a great, fun read with plenty of information and marketing tips. The text is broken up into a modified block format (each paragraph has a double-space between it that allows plenty of white space) and that layout actually made the book even easier to read.
If you're interested in marketing, or understanding your husband's reluctance to go shopping even when he needs to, Tungate explains some of what's going on. Anyone that's read Alissa Quart's book BRANDED: THE BUYING AND SELLING OF TEENAGERS will enjoy this one as a follow-up. And if you haven't read Quart's book, you're in for two books that are definite eye-openers.
Branded Male: Marketing to Men Overview

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Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands Review

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Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands ReviewLiked this book very much. The irreverence and polemic were refreshing. Holt and Cameron practice what they preach, and don't pull punches. The ideas and thinking are solid. The cases are excellent. After reading I recommended to friends at ad agencies, many of whom no doubt face H & C's `brand bureaucracy'.
Style-wise, `Cultural Strategy' found a nice niche between scholarship and practice. I liked this approach. But if you prefer 1-2-3 books on brand and strategy, don't buy the book. You're going to get Max Weber and terms like `mimetic isomorphism' just as much you get stories on brands like Nike, Levi's, Vitamin Water and Fat Tire. I liked the combination, others might not.
As someone in strategy, I do have some beef with Holt and Cameron's stance against utility, or what they refer to as `mousetrap' thinking. They take the constructivist line of thinking too far, and it diminishes their argument. They need a foil, but of all their polemics this one feels more rhetorical than substantive. Ideally, value creation and cultural innovation work together. If subjectivity were all that mattered we wouldn't be in this recession. H & C have written particular kinds of cases-- products fighting it out in mature markets with homogeneous offerings. In these situations i think they're argument holds up better. In emerging markets where the there is still a great deal of diversity in offerings, i'm not as sure. The one outlier here is the freelancer's union case, which was quite good.
But on all other accounts, this book furthered my thinking. Even if you don't agree with the authors, they'll engage you. I'd read it.
Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands OverviewMarket innovation has long been dominated by the worldview of engineers and economists--build a better mousetrap and the world will take notice. The most influential strategy books--such as Competing for the Future, The Innovator's Dilemma, and Blue Ocean Strategy--argue that innovation should focus on breakthrough functionality. Holt and Cameron challenge this conventional wisdom. They develop a cultural approach to innovation: champion a better ideology and the world will take notice. The authors use detailed historical analyses of the take-offs of Nike, vitaminwater, Marlboro, Starbucks, Jack Daniel's, Levi's, ESPN, and Ben & Jerry's to build a powerful new theory. They show how brands in mature categories come to rely upon similar conventional brand expressions, leading to what the authors call a cultural orthodoxy. Historical changes in society threaten this orthodoxy by creating demand for new culture. Cultural innovations draw upon source material--novel cultural content lurking in subcultures, social movements, and the media--to develop brands that respond to this emerging demand, leapfrogging entrenched incumbents. The authors demonstrate how they have adapted this theory into a step-by-step cultural strategy model, which they successfully applied to start-ups (Fat Tire beer), consumer technologies (Clearblue pregnancy tests), under-funded challengers (Fuse Music Television), and social enterprises (Freelancers Union). Holt and Cameron conclude by explaining why top marketing companies fail at cultural innovation. Using careful organizational research, the authors demonstrate that companies are trapped in the brand bureaucracy, which systematically derails innovation. Cultural innovation requires a new organizational logic. In all of their cases, the authors find that the cultural innovators have rejected the brand bureaucracy. Written by one of the leading authorities on brands and marketing in the world today, Cultural Strategy transforms what has always been treated as the "intuitive" side of branding into a systematic strategic discipline.

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