Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust from Wedgwood to Dell
- Book Review,
by Nancy F. Koehn
Amazon.com
In Brand New, Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn looks at six entrepreneurs and the extraordinary brands they built. The entrepreneurs include Josiah Wedgwood, Henry Heinz, Marshall Field, Estee Lauder, and Michael Dell. What interests Koehn is not so much the success that these brands enjoyed as much as the trust these household names were able to inspire in consumers. Koehn makes her study especially relevant to today's marketers in that each of the entrepreneurs she looks at developed their brand during a period of tumultuous change. For example, Wedgewood's tableware became popular during the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the middle class; Schultz's coffee empire blossomed in the 1990s and the present-day information revolution. Part business history, part marketing manual, Brand New is a valuable study of brand development that belongs on every thoughtful marketer's bookshelf. --Harry C. Edwards
The Star Tribune, May 2001
"It's [Brand New] really good stuff, the true human drama of business, engagingly written and illustrated with great photos."
Book Description
Until Josiah Wedgwood, Britons ate from wood and pewter plates. Until Henry Heinz, women toiled over pickled foods. Until Michael Dell, few people owned a personal computer, let alone dreamed of buying one "built to order." According to business historian Nancy F. Koehn, these pathbreaking entrepreneurs shared a powerful gift: the ability to discern how economic and social change would affect consumer needs and wants. In Brand New, Koehn introduces us to six extraordinary leaders of brand creation who lived and worked during periods of widespread change: Josiah Wedgwood in the Industrial Revolution; Henry Heinz and Marshall Field in the Transportation and Communication Revolution; and Estée Lauder, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and Michael Dell in the Information Revolution. Through compelling and engaging profiles of these entrepreneurial visionaries, she reveals a provocative relationship between economic turbulence, household priorities, and company strategy that holds important lessons for today's brand builders. According to Koehn, these forward-thinking individuals understood the profound effects that socioeconomic change has on what customers want, have, and can afford as much as on what companies make-and were masters at exploiting the enormous business opportunities these demand-side shifts created. Indeed, the brands and companies created by these individuals have become such a part of everyday life that we've made them part of common speech: we pass the Heinz; eat off Wedgwood; order a Starbucks. Koehn draws from their diaries, correspondence, and official business records to demonstrate that these entrepreneurs were more than savvy marketers; they were institution builders. She shows how each used brand not as a logo, but as a vital strategic tool for creating best-of-class companies-and for building powerful organizational capabilities that supported their connections with customers and helped make new markets for their offerings. Distilling critical lessons for businesses operating in both the traditional and on-line worlds, Brand New will convince every entrepreneur of the remarkable power of brands to transform start-ups, gain competitive advantage, and change lives.
Book Info
Exposes the secrets behind the success of some of the world's most famous brands, including how they engendered the trust of their customers, despite being entrepreneurs. Case studies some of the most innovative companies, from Estee Lauder and Clinique to Dell Computers and Starbucks. Includes two sections of black and white photos. DLC: Entrepreneurship.
From the Back Cover
"The hottest word in business lingo today is branding. Koehn has entered the scene to write a book that explains the meaning of this overused term. In this lucidly and entertainingly written book, Koehn traces how six great companies created enduring brands. In each case they thought first not of an ad campaign or catchy sales pitch but of the ingredients that would make their product distinctive. A valuable addition to any business collection." -Ken Auletta, Author and Communications Columnist, The New Yorker "Brand New is an unforgettable collective portrait of six entrepreneurs and the great companies they founded. With brilliant insight and vivid prose, Koehn takes the reader inside the minds of her entrepreneurs and analyzes the reasons their companies prospered even as most of their competitors failed. With a memorable mix of old and new, Koehn is able to accomplish that rarest of historical feats: rigorous use of the past to inform the present, and vice versa. Her book is simply an outstanding achievement." -Thomas K. McCraw, Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School ADDITIONAL ENDORSEMENTS: "Brand New felicitously blends biography, business history, and conceptual analysis in a book that gives the vogue word branding a rich and surprising past. Koehn writes with lively prose and has the historian's eye for illuminating detail. From Wedgwood and Heinz to Estée Lauder and Dell, her entrepreneurs created lasting brands, but always in a context of their own choosing. While giving due credit to their enterprise, Koehn brings out the interplay between vision and the historical forces that make it realizable." -Jack Beatty, Senior Editor, Atlantic Monthly and Author, Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America "Brand New is absolutely essential reading for anyone who has ever aspired to build a successful business. Countless "new new thing" technologies end up not making it to companyhood because their creators fail to appreciate basic lessons of businesses and brands past. In all moments of great economic change, technology matters. But understanding customers and meeting their needs effectively and meaningfully matter just as much-sometimes more. Using a range of compelling historical and modern companies, Brand New lays out a series of critical lessons that no businessperson operating in today's turbocharged environment can afford to ignore." -Jonathan Bush, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder, Athenahealth "Koehn has opened a new field of business history-one that focuses on the demand side rather than the supply side in technologically new industries. She brilliantly records the careers of six entrepreneurs who, by defining customer needs, became leaders in their rapidly growing markets. By combining past and present, she joins her talents as a historian, case writer, and teacher to provide a new perspective on branding." -Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus, Harvard Business School "Today's literature on brand building is replete with simpleminded platitudes and prescriptions generally divorced from any context other than someone's most recent success story. With Brand New, Koehn has successfully described the complex evolution of modern consumer brands. In viewing contemporary business behavior through six of the world's great brand developers, she provides the reader with an interesting set of tales with significant take-home value. A superb read!" -Len Schlesinger, Executive Vice President, The Limited, Inc. "In a world where many companies are built to sell, Brand New shows how companies can be built to last-and that is where value is created. Unlike the recent spending frenzy, history shows that brands are built by giving value to customers, suppliers, capital sources, and employees-and by doing so at a margin that preserves the economic engine. The entrepreneurs in this book built enduring best-of-class businesses by creating change and living through it. Their stories contribute to an inspiring book." -Howard Stevenson, Senior Associate Dean and Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School "Nancy Koehn understands how markets reward quality brand names, which is the essence of honorable capitalism. Indeed, in this field of study she is the quality brand name." -Ben Wattenberg, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute and Moderator, PBS's weekly discussion program Think Tank
About the Author
Nancy F. Koehn is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.
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