Brands and the Challenge of Time

Jean-Noel Kapferer

The article is adopted from Jean-Noel Kapferer's book entitled 'Reinventing the Brand' He argues that brands are paradoxical - on the one hand they must be they must be consistent and on the other must be able to adapt to constantly changing market.

Brands and the Challenge of Time1

Jean-Nol Kapferer HEC School of Marketing, Paris

In most companies, brand portfolios consist of some new brands and some longer-established not to say older brands. Although the latter are not generally renowned for eliciting passion from marketing departments and young managers, they still account for significant sales and profits in many cases.

Some very old brands always seem up-to-date, while other more recent brands already seem dated: compare, for example, Coca-Cola with Naf-Naf. How can we explain the difference between these brands? The problem resides in the balance between identity...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands