After Image: Mind-Altering Marketing [Hardcover]

At worst, Grant's case studies and off-the-cuff suggestions for improvement for well known brands, display his own prodigious planning intellect. At best, they are inspirational and make you want to get into the office and shake things up a bit.

Media agencies will love this text for its overt support of their cause to get a bigger piece of the strategic pie. But, will they ever get the seat at the head of the table if they don't actually come up with the creative ideas? Isn't it the creative agencies that really control the message and how its disseminated? Anyway, that's a debate for another forum.

In summary, I buy his theory and think that all the best brands are the best exponents of 'Knowledge Marketing'. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the apparatus of marketing (marketing departments and agencies) to catch-up and work in the way Grant advocates. Any person in marketing who has any form of strategic or creative responsibility should read this book.

Firstly Grant asserts that if the latter part of the 20th century was about materialism and aspiration - what gave brand imagery it's power, western societies have switched into full learning mode for the majority of the population. Brands have to play a fundamentally different role. This has changed the balance of power firmly away from ad spots towards programming and media that is increasingly open for marketers to place their own content.

The goal for marketers now is create ideas with which their brands can be associated. Ownership of this kind is far more valuable than the personalities which brands were carefully constructed from using insights into brand users and the aspirations of brand users. Concepts have a life of their own where brand imagery needed to be constantly promoted and tended.

Grant introduces a new branding model which draws on the latest research in neuroscience to show how mental propositions and sensory maps can be harness to take ownership of ideas. Quite a lot of the book is spent showing how to deploy this new branding model.

For me the compelling chapters are those on the different types of media: knowledge/reality/dialogue/memetic/story/reputation and how these should be used to trigger shifts in conceptual thinking.

You might think that this is a polemic against advertising from a former ad planner who has seen the light. Far from it - if there is a flaw in the book it is that it doesn't really explain what the new role for advertising is in a learning society - image is just irrelevant. Where ad agencies will want to quibble is whether controlling media content will ever be as effective as advertising. Even if marketers are sitting in the editorial chair cheque book in hand.

PR and new media agencies and some of the new wave media independents will fall on this book with unbridled enthusiasm but ad agencies will want to argue about the writing on the wall. Either way if you enjoyed The New Marketing Manifesto then you'll want to get your hands on Episode 2. Believe me it isn't a repeat...