These are the books Professor Satoshi (Toshi) Akutsu recommends you read in 2022!
"Since some MBA students asked me about good textbooks for brand management, I would recommend the textbook written by a brand management guru, David Aaker. It comprehensively covers key topics of brand management with a variety of cases." (Toshi)"Aaker on Branding" is a source for how you create and maintain strong brands and synergetic brand portfolios. It provides a checklist of strategies, perspectives, tools, and concepts that represents not only what you should know but also what action options should be on the table. When followed, these principles will lead to strong, enduring brands that both support business strategies going forward and create coherent and effective brand families.
"I would supplement the above textbook with the following book on practical branding framework and step-by-step implementation methods that I wrote
with an experienced practitioner. It's in Japanese and translated into Chinese and Korean." (Toshi)Creating an invisible context that leads to customer needs is the biggest challenge in branding. This article introduces a new method that focuses on this context, along with case studies.
This book introduces the concept of branding and its creation of scenarios to the practical application for brand strategy. The book analyzes the process of brand recognition by focusing on "context," the cognitive mechanism of consumers, and analyzes the paths that a brand's message is conveyed to customers.
Satoshi (Toshi) Akutsu received his BA and MA from Hitotsubashi University, and his MS and PhD from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Hitotsubashi University, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization at the Haas School. During the 2007-2008 academic year, he spent a sabbatical at UC Berkeley where he was affiliated with both the Haas School and the Department of Psychology. He was also a member of the Culture and Cognition Laboratory and affiliated with IPSR at UC Berkeley.
Professor Akutsu’s recent papers include “Work, meaning, and gene regulation: Findings from a Japanese technology firm” in Psychoneuroendocrinology, “We have emotions but can’t show them! Authoritarian leadership, emotion suppression climate, and team performance” in Human Relations, “Optimism and the conserved transcriptional response to adversity” in Health Psychology, “The role of anger regulation on perceived stress status and physical health” in Frontiers in Psychology, “Why do people give? The role of identity in giving” in Journal of Consumer Psychology, among others. He has authored a number of book chapters, including for Dinnie (Ed.), Nation branding: Concepts, issues, practice, Takeuchi & Nonaka (Eds.), Hitotsubashi on knowledge management, and Nonaka & Teece (Eds.), Managing industrial knowledge: Creation, transfer, and utilization.