Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust from Wedgwood to Dell

Design Management Journal, Winter 2002 by Mangrulkar, Seema

As a title, Brand New strikes me as a bit misleading, especially if you're seeking marketing wisdom for these and future times. Nancy Koehn, a self-confessed "brand historian," provides a look at two centuries of what we now call "customer focus"-what it meant to consumers at different times, and how it contributed to building the "megabrands" she takes as examples. This book is quite a compendium of information and anecdotes testifying to the single-mindedness of the architects of some of the world's most enduring brands. Koehn follows these individuals across six widely varying industries, covering companies from Marshall Fields to Starbucks. What did these brand-builders have in common? An awareness of and a sensitivity to the brand environment that could be translated into business sense. Estee Lauder, for example, made a strategic decision to associate her brand with upscale department stores and thus gain greater credibility and prestige. Josiah Wedgwood named his china after royalty but made it accessible to the British middle class. And Howard Schultz of Starbucks made coffee more than a vehicle for caffeine.

There are almost no charts and graphs in Brand New, and that's because these individuals left the theorizing out of their business processes. They were too busy making the most of the opportunities that were available to them; their resources were limited, but their creativity was abundant. Most of them ventured into untapped markets and actually created an environment and a need for their products or services. Undeterred by setbacks, they laid the foundation for brands that became household names.

Rich in historical narrative, with more than 100 pages of credits and reference notes, Brand New straddles the line between individual biography and brand chronicle and locates both in the socioeconomic context of their times.