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

In Brand New, Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn looks at six entrepreneurs and the extraordinary brands that they built including 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 that these household names were able to inspire with 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 fascinating study of brand development that belongs on every thoughtful marketer's bookshelf. --Harry C. Edwards

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.

Nancy F. Koehn is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.