What becomes an Icon most?, Douglas B. Holt, Harvard Business Review, 2003 Some brands become icons. Think of Nike, Apple, Harley-Davidson. But they are not built according to the principles of conventional marketing, says Harvard Business School marketing professor Douglas Holt. Iconic brands beat the competition not just by delivering innovative benefits, services, or technologies, but by forging a deep connection with the culture. A brand becomes an icon when it offers a compelling myth. In America, the most potent myths are depictions of rebels. Mountain Dew has long offered a rebel myth in ads showing exciting, vital men who are far from the ideological model of success. Loyal customers drink the beverage to consume the myth. But Mountain Dew's greatest achievement is that it has retained its iconic power by creating fresh rebel myths to suit the tensions of each era. Holt says marketers can learn from Mountain Dew and other iconic brands if they are willing to move beyond conventional brand management.

Selling the Brand Inside, Colin Mitchell, Harvard Business Review, 2002 When you think of marketing, chances are your mind goes right to your customers - how can you persuade more people to buy whatever it is you sell? But there's another "market" that's equally important: your employees. Author Colin Mitchell argues that executives by and large ignore this critical internal audience when developing and executing branding campaigns. As a result, employees end up undermining the expectations set by the company's advertising - either because they don't understand what the ads have promised or because they don't believe in the brand and feel disengaged or, worse, hostile toward the company. Mitchell offers three principles for executing internal branding campaigns. First, companies need to market to employees at times when the company is experiencing a fundamental challenge or change. Second, companies must link their internal and external marketing campaigns. And, third, internal branding campaigns should bring the brand alive for employees, creating an emotional connection to the company that transcends any one experience.

How to make after-sales services pay off, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/, 2003 For durable-goods manufacturers, service contracts are an increasingly important revenue stream, since they offer high margins and can account for 30 per cent or more of income. But these plans are hard to price because costs can vary widely. While many companies are squandering this potential profit by offering poorly designed service plans, this article tells how a few of them are capturing tremendous value by taking a fact-based approach to pricing services. By carefully segmenting customers according to service needs and developing tools to track costs, some manufacturers have boosted their operating margins for services by three to nine percentage points, typically within a year, explains the author.

Brand building in emerging markets, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/, 2003 US and European consumer goods companies have hit a wall in their home markets; competition is fierce and growth minimal. But as these companies enter the fast-growing emerging markets of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this article explains how they face an equally harsh reality. The time-honoured techniques that have made them leaders in developed markets - expensive brand building, frequent product enhancements, and sophisticated marketing - are ill suited to the vast, but price-sensitive, middle and low ends of emerging markets, says the author. A study of 23 product introductions in such regions illuminates the operational and organisational approaches most likely to succeed there. This article discusses that the brand-name products will always capture their share of affluent consumers. But in the low-end of emerging markets, companies should take their cues from local competitors: keep local managers in place, adhere to local standards of quality, and maintain the autonomy - and the cost efficiency - of local operations.