The process of brand management originated in US consumer goods companies in the 1930s and is now firmly established as a core activity within the marketing department of any significant enterprise. In recent years, there has been a great surge of scholarly and popular interest in the subject. Almost every university offers courses in this area; new journals have formed that focus on brand issues; and an ever-increasing number of books and research articles attest to the growing attention paid to brands and their management.

As work on brands and brand management flourishes now as it has never done before, this new title in the Routledge series, Critical Perspectives on Business and Management, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject’s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by Richard Elliott, a prominent scholar in the field, Brands and Brand Management is a four-volume collection of classic and contemporary contributions. It brings together material drawn from the plethora of international business and management journals, as well as excerpts from key books and harder-to-find sources. This one-stop resource gathers not just the most important work on brands and how to manage them, but also key research on the fast-developing area of corporate reputation; the emerging areas of managing brands across cultures; and criticism of brands as pernicious elements of globalization.

The first of the four volumes is dedicated to the historical antecedents of brands. It collects research exploring their evolution from signals of provenance and quality to their current status as carriers of symbolic meaning and trust. Volume II brings together the most important writing on the measurement and management of brand equity, including the two major proprietary approaches to the diagnosis of brand health. Volume III gathers the best and most influential thinking on corporate brands and business-to-business brands, and the management of corporate reputation. Volume IV covers the management of brands across cultural and international boundaries. It also contains indispensable scholarship on the emerging social critique of brands, as well as on the defence of their contribution to developing economies.

Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Brands and Brand Management is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be valued by marketing and business scholars—as well as those working in allied areas—as a vital research tool.