The 5Bs of modern branding with David Aaker

Episode notes

Few people have shaped how we think about brands more than David Aaker. He spent three decades building the frameworks that CMOs and marketing students worldwide still reach for today. His latest work revisits those ideas for a world he describes as fundamentally more hostile to brands than ever before. In this episode of In Other Words, host Jason Hemingway sits down with David to discuss how branding has evolved since the scanner-data-driven 1980s, why the pressure for short-term results keeps undermining long-term brand investment, and what it takes to build trust in an era of rampant skepticism. They also get into how brand meaning holds or doesn't as companies scale across markets and organizational boundaries, and why the challenge of managing a brand across languages, geographies, and internal silos is one of the least discussed but most consequential problems in global marketing. David introduces his new 5Bs framework and explains why treating branding as a single dimension is one of the most costly mistakes an executive can make.