David Allen Aaker

David Allen Aaker (born February 11, 1938) is an American organizational theorist, consultant and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, a specialist in marketing with a focus on brand strategy. He serves as Vice Chairman of the San Francisco-based growth consulting company Prophet.

Education Aaker received his SB in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, then his MA in Statistics and PhD in Business Administration at Stanford University.

Career

He is the E.T. Grether Professor Emeritus of Marketing Strategy at the Haas School of Business and the vice chairman of Prophet, a global brand and marketing consultancy firm, and an advisor to Dentsu, a Japanese advertising agency.

He has been awarded three career awards for contributions to the science of marketing: The Paul D. Converse Award, The Vijay Mahajan Award, and The Buck Weaver Award. Aaker was inducted into the New York American Marketing Association's Hall of Fame in 2015.

Aaker has won the award for "best article" in the California Management Review and in the Journal of Marketing (twice). His book, Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, was named among the "Ten Marketing Books You Should Have Read" by Advertising Age in 2011 and named one of the top 3 marketing books of the year by Strategy and Business. Aaker also has a regular column in American Marketing Association's Marketing News called "Aaker on Branding".

Aaker was one of the eleven people included in the 2007 book Conversations with Marketing Masters.

Work

Aaker Model Aaker is the creator of the Aaker Model, a marketing model that views brand equity as a combination of brand awareness, brand loyalty, and brand associations. The model outlines the necessity of developing a brand identity, which is a unique set of brand associations representing what the brand stands for and offers to customers an aspiring brand image.

Aaker primarily sees brand identity as consisting of 8–12 elements which fall under four perspectives: Brand as Product – consists of product scope, product attributes, quality or value of the product, uses, users and country of origin. Brand as Organisation – consists of organizational attributes and local workings versus global activities. Brand as Person – consists of brand personality and customer-brand relationships. Brand as Symbol – consists of audio and visual imagery, metaphorical symbols and brand heritage. 1991. Managing Brand Equity, second edition 2009 1996. Building Strong Brands 2001. Developing Business Strategies 2000. (with Erich Jochimsthaler) Brand Leadership: The Next Level of the Brand Revolution 2004. Brand Portfolio Strategy: Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy, Leverage, and Clarity 2005. From Fargo to the World of Brands: My Story So Far 2007. Strategic Market Management 2008. Spanning Silos: The New CMO Imperative 2010. Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, Jossey-Bass 2014. "Aaker on Branding", Morgan James Publishing, 2018. "Creating Signature Stories Morgan James Publishing, 2020. "Owning Game-Changing Subcategories" Morgan James Publishing, 2023. "The Future of Purpose-driven Branding" Morgan James Publishing, 2024. "Aaker on Branding 2nd Ed." Morgan James Publishing,