Book reviews
Brand Royalty: How the world’s top
100 brands thrive and survive
by Matt Haig
Kogan Page Ltd, UK; 2004; ISBN 0 7494 4257 3; 288pp plus 16pp colour
illustrations; hardback; £18.99
This book is a very enjoyable and
stimulating tour round some of the
success stories from the world of
branding. Author Matt Haig acknow-
ledges that there doubtlessly will be
objections to some of the brands
contained within what he has chosen as
his world’s top 100 brands, while
defending his choice on the basis that
the spectrum of brands covered allows
for vivid demonstration of some of
the common themes that characterise
durably successful brands. Haig puts
brands and branding in the context of
wider society by stating that through
the invention of a new product
category or the radical change of an old
one, a brand becomes more than a
machine for making money; it be-
comes an influencer on society, chang-
ing the nature of everyday life.
‘Brand Royalty’ consists of a series
of 100 vignettes, each easily digestible
at an average of three or four pages’
length, summarised with a ‘Secrets of
Success’ list of bullet points. Of course
such brevity can lead to superficiality,
as in the case of the BMW vignette
where the secrets of success are given
as ‘Definition: A BMW defines its
owner. It says the owner is likely to
be wealthy, adrenalin-seeking, com-
petitive, driven and looking for an
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‘‘ultimate’’ experience’, and ‘Focus:
Although BMW has made the odd
mistake of moving too far up- or
downmarket, it has generally kept the
kind of tight focus necessary for any
corporate brand’. Although these ob-
servations may be somewhat trite, the
vast majority of the cases discussed in
the book are done so in an extremely
incisive and entertaining manner.
For the 17 chapters that comprise the
book, Haig has used a taxonomy that
categorises brands in various ways, for
example, ‘Innovation brands’ such as
Adidas, Sony, Hoover and Toyota;
‘Pioneer brands’ such as Gillette,
Kleenex, Wrigley and Heinz; ‘Distrac-
tion brands’ such as MTV, Harry Potter
and Disney; ‘Streamlined brands’ such
as Cosmopolitan, Nokia and Toys ‘R’
Us; ‘Muscle brands’ such as IBM,
Wal-Mart and Microsoft; ‘Distinction
brands’ such as Evian, Duracell and
Heineken; ‘Status brands’ such as
Rolex, Courvoisier, Burberry and
Gucci; ‘People brands’ such as David
Beckham, Jennifer Lopez and Oprah
Winfrey; and ‘Responsibility brands’
such as Ben & Jerry’s, Cafedirect and
Seeds of Change. This taxonomy gives
a solid structure and flow to the book
that otherwise would be a haphazard
collection of anecdotes and analysis.
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BOOK REVIEWS
The opening vignette in the book
focuses on Adidas, tracing the back-
ground of the company, its relationship
to Nike and, as with all the other
brands featured in the book, a sum-
mary of what Haig perceives to be
the secrets of the brand’s success. For
Adidas, one success factor is identified
as the way that Adidas keeps its his-
tory alive through its sports heritage
division. Haig observes that far from
making the brand seem stuffy and out-
dated, its ‘old-school’ ranges are con-
sidered the most fashionable among the
hip-hop community.
The following vignette looks at
Sony, whose secrets of success are
judged to include a distrust of market
research and a belief in buzz. As
regards a distrust of market research,
this refers to the famous case of the
Sony Walkman where market research
prior to the product’s introduction was
very negative but Sony pressed ahead
anyway and was richly rewarded for its
belief in its product. Akito Morita of
Sony is quoted as saying, ‘I do not
believe that any amount of market
research could have told us that it
would have been successful . . . The
public does not know what is possible.
We do.’ While such a statement could
be construed as arrogant, it encapsu-
lates the faith that innovators must
possess to avoid being deterred from
taking necessary risks. The other secret
of Sony’s success alluded to above, a
belief in buzz, refers to the time
when the Walkman first appeared in
Japan and Sony workers walked the
streets of their native Tokyo with
Walkmans strapped to them, thus
creating a valuable buzz around this
new product.
One of the most interesting cases in
the book is that of Federal Express.
168 䉷 HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1350-231X BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 13, NO. 2, 167–174 NOVEMBER 2005
Haig describes how the company
was launched in 1851 and grew its
reputation during the American Civil
War when it transported supplies to
the eventually victorious Union army.
From a branding perspective, the
company is shown to have set itself the
ambitious goal of becoming the world’s
most respected service brand, and as
one means of achieving this it has
successfully managed the transition
from a prestige to a populist brand.
The ability to evolve is thus identified
as one of Federal Express’s secrets of
success.
Whereas Federal Express is cited
as an example of a company that
has skilfully evolved from prestige to
populist brand, Haig warns that this
transition is a risky one. He illustrates
this danger with the example of Mer-
cedes-Benz’s introduction of cheaper
cars to its traditionally very expen-
sive range. Haig pithily comments that
‘people who drive a Mercedes-Benz
like to feel superior; whether they
continue to feel superior when every-
one can afford one remains to be
seen’.
The importance of appropriate new
product development is crucial in
brand management, discussed here in
the context of the Kleenex brand.
Haig’s view is that the Kleenex product
has been varied and reinvented almost
continually over the last eight decades
and that such variations inject new life
into the brand without extending it
into inappropriate categories, as a
result of which Kleenex is still solely
associated with tissues. A similarly
sensitive approach to new product
development is evinced by MTV, a
global brand that adapts its content not
only to each geographic market, but
also to the musical tastes of each

market niche. MTV is also shown to
be a good example of how to deal with
the problem faced by any youth brand,
namely that eventually your audience
outgrows you. MTV has dealt with this
problem by setting up VH1, ‘a music
channel aimed at a slightly older and
calmer viewership’.
Another youth brand analysed by
Haig is the jeans brand Diesel, whose
pioneering self-referential advertising
lampoons the over-inflated claims of
rival brands that promise to improve or
add meaning to our lives simply by
selling us a pair of jeans. The author
describes how Diesel deliberately ad-
vertises a kitsch, uncool, 1950s-style
ethos, which paradoxically makes it
even cooler.
Creating Passion Brands
by Helen Edwards and Derek Day
Kogan Page, London; 2005; ISBN 0 7494 43707; 238pp; paperback; £25
The blandness of consumer-led brands
is the central theme underpinning this
intellectually invigorating book. Ed-
wards and Day contend that the obses-
sive consumer-centric focus of most of
today’s brands results not so much in
customer satisfaction or delight, but
rather in a drab homogeneity wherein
brands strive to pander to fickle con-
sumer whims rather than boldly assert-
ing their own brand personality. The
authors take the view that ‘current
brand management practice, with its
䉷 HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1350-231X BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 13, NO. 2, 167–174 NOVEMBER 2005
BOOK REVIEWS
When it comes to concluding what
sets apart the durably successful brands
featured in ‘Brand Royalty’ from less
successful brands, Haig suggests that
the examples in this book are successful
not because they conform to a neat
little set of laws that apply to all brands
but because they follow their own
individual path with confidence; suc-
cessful brands are similar in that they all
have a clear vision, but that vision is
never the same. The reader should find
plenty of inspiration and ideas regard-
ing clarity of vision and distinct brand
identity throughout this well-written,
very well-informed book.
Keith Dinnie
Book Review Editor
slavish devotion to consumer whims
and directives, is leading brands on
a road to nowhere’. Their proposed
solution lies in creating the passion
brands of the book’s title, brands which
remain true to themselves, maintaining
a keen awareness of consumer attitudes
but leading these attitudes rather than
following them.
CEOs, marketing professionals and
MBA students are the stated target
market for this book. Perhaps for this
reason, some flattery is thrown in the
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