"Management books on branding usually trade on the apt anecdote: They either rely on a whirlwind of short, seconhand snippets or else use quick I-was-there insider briefings to demand that the reader accepts their arguments. From an academic viewpoint, what is troubling about these books (some of which have been written by academics) is that the empirical data that author summon is so thin that they cannot possibly develop an explanatory model. The reccomendations that flow out of these models are so vague that it is impossible to distinguish between the activities of the best brands and the most medicore. Further, much of the "data" that drive the findings in these books are actually assembled from predistilled stories reported in business press. So rather than careful primary research, most authors are simply repeating stories that the patagonists (the client and agency) want to tell about their brands. The average analysis of a brand in most of these book extends all of two or three pages, satisvactory for coctail conversation and not much else"
Douglas B. Holt "How Brands Become Icons. The Principles of Cultural Branding", Note #2 to Appendix, p. 243
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