Book excerpt: In perhaps the most creative and authoritative book on selling brands ever written, international business experts Keith Lincoln, Anthony Aconis and Lars Thomassen, reveal how the world's most successful brands sell themselves to today's increasingly demanding shoppers and retailers. As the world of mass communications evolves into the world of media of the masses the very concept of the brand is transforming - from branding to the shelf to branding from the shelf. Two years in the analysis Retailization is the largest study ever conducted on how corporations and their brands are dealing (or not dealing) with this new era. The study covering over twenty countries worldwide and interviews with some of the leading brand marketers has drawn on countless examples of both creative execution and retail impact. Retailization shows how to establish a business approach that can better meet the needs of today's shopping Kings and Queens by creating and activating revolutionary selling situations. The central thesis of this book is that corporations must undertake nothing less than a radical reinvention of how they reach their customers to sell their products. The shelf where products are sold is the new centre of the business and communications universe. The answer to how to get the most from this change lies in a radically new business philosophy - RETAILIZATION. Retailization presents an innovative and pragmatic step by step process to help businesses rethink, reimagine and restructure their entire business and brand efforts around the retail strategies and executions that can better meet the needs of today's shopping Kings and Queens. Research shows that we have as little as four seconds to get a shopper's attention. The authors explain what you need to do to guarantee that you own that four seconds from understanding your competitive arena and context to understanding the nature of today's shopper. From there they explain how you can optimize the creation of your products, your retail impact and your communications. Finally, they demonstrate how to activate the process through retailizing your entire organization from top to bottom and we how to verify the results.