The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden

Companies today face a dilemma in marketing. The tried-and-true formulas to create sales and market share behind brands are becoming irrelevant and losing traction with consumers. In this book, Gerzema and LeBar offer credible evidence--drawn from a detailed analysis of a decade's worth of brand and financial data using Y&R's Brand Asset Valuator (BAV), the largest database of brands in the world--that business is riding on yet another bubble that is ready to burst--a brand bubble. While most managers still see metrics like trust and awareness as the backbone of how brands are built, Gerzema asserts they're dead wrong--these metrics do not add to increased asset value. In fact, by following them, they actually hasten the declining value of their brands.

Although Gerd Heinrich, a devoted naturalist, specialized in wasps, Bernd Heinrich tried to distance himself from his "old-fashioned" father, becoming a hybrid: a modern, experimental biologist with a naturalist's sensibilities.

In this extraordinary memoir, the award-winning author shares the ways in which his relationship with his father, combined with his unique childhood, molded him into the scientist, and man, he is today. From Gerd's days as a soldier in Europe and the family's daring escape from the Red Army in 1945 to the rustic Maine farm they came to call home, Heinrich relates it all in his trademark style, making science accessible and awe-inspiring.

What Charles Darwin did for biology, Al and Laura Ries do for branding.

In their exciting new book, The Origin of Brands, the Rieses take Darwin's revolutionary idea of evolution and apply it to the branding process. What results is a new and strikingly effective strategy for creating innovative products, building a successful brand, and, in turn, achieving business success.Here, the Rieses explain how changing conditions in the marketplace create endless opportunities to build new brands and accumulate riches. But these opportunities cannot be found where most people and most companies look. That is, in the convergence of existing categories like television and the computer, the cellphone and the Internet.

Instead, opportunity lies in the opposite direction—in divergence. By following Darwin's brilliant deduction that new species arise from divergence of an existing species, the Rieses outline an effective strategy for creating and taking to market an effective brand. In The Origin of Brands, you will learn how to:

• Divide and conquer
• Exploit divergence
• Use the theories of survival of the firstest and survival of the secondest
• Harness the power of pruning

Using insightful studies of failed convergence products and engaging success stories of products that have achieved worldwide success through divergence, the Rieses have written the definitive book on branding. The Origin of Brands will show you in depth how to build a great brand and will lead you to success in the high-stakes world of branding.

The 13 short pieces featured in Passionate Gardener roam widely and wildly, examining, among other things, common idiosyncrasies and the collective chaos of garden clubs, the host of psychopathologies that afflict "plants people," and obsessive-compulsive behavior such as the chronic moving of plants. This is an irreverent exploration of the fierce attachment so many people develop to the potty world of peat moss and perennials.

This ground-breaking book defines the concept of brand relevance using dozens of case studies-Prius, Whole Foods, Westin, iPad and more-and explains how brand relevance drives market dynamics, which generates opportunities for your brand and threats for the competition. Aaker reveals how these companies have made other brands in their categories irrelevant. Key points: When managing a new category of product, treat it as if it were a brand; By failing to produce what customers want or losing momentum and visibility, your brand becomes irrelevant; and create barriers to competitors by supporting innovation at every level of the organization.

• Using dozens of case studies, shows how to create or dominate new categories or subcategories, making competitors irrelevant
• Shows how to manage the new category or subcategory as if it were a brand and how to create barriers to competitors
• Describes the threat of becoming irrelevant by failing to make what customer are buying or losing energy
• David Aaker, the author of four brand books, has been called the father of branding

Aaker offers readers step-by-step advice on what to do when confronting scenarios such as the following:

• Brands are underleveraged

• The business strategy is at risk because of inadequate brand platforms

• The business faces a relevance threat caused by emerging subcategories

• The firm's brands are tired and bland

• Strategy is paralyzed by a lack of priority among the brands

• Brands are cluttered and confusing to both customers and employees

• The firm needs to move into the super-premium or value arenas to create margin or sales volume

• Margin pressures require points of differentiation