How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding by Douglas B. Holt, Harvard Business School Press, September 2004, ISBN: 1578517745, $29.95, 263 pp.

Your reviewer is usually not a big fan of “academic” business books. But let's dispense with suspense here—your reviewer find's Dr. Holt's new book to be a must read—for practitioners as well as academics, for new-product marketers as well as advertising folks. Depending on your brand and product category, you very well may want to add a new section to your positioning statement and a new column to your creative brief—a cultural brief.