Sell the Brand First: How to Sell Your Brand and Create Lasting Customer Loyalty

Citation

Jevons, C. (2010), "Sell the Brand First: How to Sell Your Brand and Create Lasting Customer Loyalty", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 67-67. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610421011018419

This book is about using the brand as a sales tool. It is aimed at sales people with some experience, but who would nevertheless be surprised to hear that that they are the biggest investment a company makes in its branding (p. 19). The target readership for this book would find the idea that they are selling the hole, not the drill, a novelty, and would not have heard the statement “No‐one ever got fired for buying IBM” (p. 11) or, if they had heard it, would not have understood the implications behind that sentence. Clearly, then, this book does not push back the boundaries of knowledge. To be frank, the academic readership of the Journal of Product and Brand Management would generally work with, and teach, people who have thought more deeply about brands, marketing and selling than those who would benefit from this book.

This is not to say that the book is of no value. Far from it. That this book was published by a reputable firm, and presumably sells well, is instructive to those of us who would describe its content as superficial and old‐fashioned. One must assume that a need is being satisfied here, and the existence of that need reminds those of us who work with people who are thoughtful and well‐educated that there are many less qualified people out there. The sort of reader who would benefit from this book is a sales person with some experience who is keen and hardworking but has been inadequately trained. Such a person might usefully build on the learnings from this book by enrolling in a college marketing or sales program.

Intellectually, the book is largely underpinned by Don and Heidi Schultz's (Schultz and Schultz, 2003) Brand Babble and Silverstein and Fiske's (2003) Trading Up – the New American Luxury. The author presents two sales models. One is the “stair‐step” model, which is essentially about selling features. He adds the idea of selling the brand to this model, and inverts it, so that it addresses customer physical and emotional benefits. Academic purists would challenge the use of “brand” and “product” synonymously; the assumption that sales and marketing are separate areas; that marketing is predicated on the four Ps; and other debatable points. Of course, in many organisations sales and marketing people are still housed in different silos, so again this shows the practical focus of the book. More easily challenged is the cheap paper that the publisher has used; there is so much show‐through that it is possible to read the words on a page through a preceding blank one. The decision to capitalize the first letter of the word “Brand” throughout the text also irritates this reader's eyes; this typographical emphasis is unnecessary.

Willy Loman, the protagonist of Arthur Miller's (1995) iconic play about the American dream, Death of a Salesman, believed that salespeople could be successful by luck alone, and all they needed to get by was a smile and a shoe shine. The unsuccessful Loman could not cope with new ideas, and continued in his blinkered and unthinking way to his inevitable and tragic demise in the play. For those people out there who are still riding a smile and a shoeshine, selling only features and price, this book will provide compelling stories supporting an argument to move towards thinking from the customer's point of view, selling benefits rather than features, and understanding the bigger picture of the brand as well as the product.