Tag: global brands

Five Management Traits For Global Brands

Via Brandchannel & Interbrand, an interesting list of five management traits that are employed by leading global brands.

Seek out insights:

Outstanding brands identify customer insights. When these insights are shared across cultures they assist in a brand’s adoption globally.

Integrate local intelligence:

Brand guidelines are tremendous tools for ensuring consistency. However, they have been known to impede innovation and diminish relevance. Brands are dynamic, never static, so the management of them must integrate new thought. In the case of global brands, to assume that one message can appeal uniformly to all audiences with equal relevance is unrealistic. Well-managed global brands cull local markets for intelligence related to the ‘next big thing’ to ensure local relevance and to counter competitor’s moves.
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Best Global Brands by Value – 2006

The previously announced Interbrand & BusinessWeek 2006 Best Global Brands by brand value is finally out with no major movements in the top 10.

Brand value is calculated as the net present value of the earnings the brand is expected to generate and secure in the future for the time frame from July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006. To be considered the brands must have a minimum brand value of US$2.7 billion, achieve about one third of their earnings outside of their home country, have publicly available marketing and financial data, and have a wider public profile beyond their direct customer base.

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Risk and Rewards for Global Brands

Very interesting Interbrand white paper which explores the attraction and risks associated with brands that are going global.

Successful global brands achieve a high degree of consistency in visual, verbal, sonic and tactile identity across geographies. They deliver a consistent customer experience worldwide, often supported by an integrated global marketing effort.

The risks of taking a brand global must be carefully weighed or the damage to the brand can be irrevocable. These risks include, but are not limited to:

  • Erroneously assuming the brand communicates the same meaning market-to-market, resulting in message confusion
  • Over-standardizing or over-simplifying the brand and its management, resulting in a culture of discouraged innovation at the local level
  • Use of the wrong (or tried and true) communications channels, resulting in inappropriate spending and ineffective impact
  • Underestimating the investment in spending and time for a market to become aware of the brand, try it, and adopt it
  • Not investing in internal brand alignment to ensure that regional employees understand the brand values and benefits and are able and willing to communicate and deliver consistently
  • Failing to modulate performance metrics based on local variables

Interbrand has identified a consistent set of principles shared by successful global brands.

Recognition
Well-performing brands enjoy strong awareness among consumers and opinion leaders. These brands lead their industry or industries.

Consistency
These brands achieve a high degree of consistency in visual, verbal, sonic and tactile identity across geographies. They deliver a consistent customer experience worldwide, often supported by an integrated global marketing effort.

Emotion
A brand is not a brand unless it competes along emotional dimensions. It must symbolize a promise that people believe can be delivered and one they desire to be part of. Through emotion, brands can achieve the loyalty of consumers by tapping into human values and aspirations that cut across cultural differences.

Uniqueness
Great brands represent great ideas. These brands express a unique position to all internal and external audiences. They effectively use all elements in the communications mix to position within and across international markets.

Adaptability
Global brands must respect local needs, wants and tastes. These brands adapt to the local marketplace while fulfilling a global mission.

Management
The organization’s senior leadership must champion the brand, ideally with the CEO leading the initiative. A leader’s continual articulation of the brand philosophy and the brand’s view of the world is meant to give the business strategy a recognizable face.

Download the full white paper (PDF)

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Chinese Brands Going Global

While many companies outside of China contemplate the riches to be made, they must be aware of the increasing competition originating from that country into global markets.

This is the caption phrase of a recently released Interbrand white paper on The Strategy for Chinese Brands.

This paper, the first in a series of two, examines this “Chinese Brand Strategy,” current perception issues, lessons from the best global brands, and the impact of leading Chinese brands. A second paper will examine Chinese what brands must do to be globally successful and how entrenched players must respond to the increasing competition.

Many Chinese brands, says the study, are quickly embracing practices common for the best global brands:

Recognition

Well-performing brands enjoy strong awareness among consumers and opinion leaders. These brands lead their industry or industries. This type of recognition represents the nexus of perception and reality, enabling brands to rapidly establish credibility in new markets.

Consistency

These brands achieve a high degree of consistency in visual, verbal, sonic and tactile identity across geographies. They deliver a consistent customer experience worldwide, often supported by an integrated global marketing effort.

Emotion

A brand is not a brand unless it competes along emotional dimensions. It must symbolize a promis that people believe can be delivered and one they desire to be part of. Through emotion, brands can achieve the loyalty of consumers by tapping into human values and aspirations that cut across cultural differences.

Uniqueness

Great brands represent great ideas. These brands express a unique position to all internal and external audiences. They effectively use all elements in the communications mix to position within and across international markets.

Adaptability

Global brands must respect local needs, wants and tastes. These brands adapt to the local marketplace while fulfilling a global mission.

Management

The organization’s senior leadership must champion the brand, ideally with the CEO leading the initiative. A leader’s continual articulation of the brand philosophy and the brand’s view of the world is meant to give the business strategy a recognizable face. The commitment is crucial, allowing for a unique positioning that transcends local idiosyncrasies and appeals to a universal aspect of human nature and experience.

Get the full report from Bnet

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Small brands

Should a small company use branding as a part of its competitive strategy? There are some factors that imply that brands with a small geographic market have a good chance to steal market shares from the gigantic, global brands.

The most important thing from a small brands perspective is to be strong in its own defined market. A smaller brand has an opportunity to serve its customers in a more flexible and in a more creative way than its greater counterparts. Most of all that goes for small brands that live and breath closer to its customers than big, global brands. Many of these small brands have a chance to get stronger if they stop having inferiority complex against the bigger brands and start to make their brands more clear and focused, and build their brand in a new and exiting way.

Small companies with local and regional markets seem to have accepted the global brand´s dominance over their customers and live by the convention that branding costs too much money and they are left to compete with product offerings and price. Even though they have realized their opportunity to offer personal service, it is seldom you come across companies that manage to do so in a unique or exiting way. Therefore they do not manage to overcross the hindrance which the credibility of the big brands put up.

You do not build a strong brand only through advertising and media, it is the collected, over all experience that makes a strong brand. This experience is infl uenced by all encounters you have with a brand, how the salesperson act, how other personnel interact with you, service, packaging, public relations, etc. The bottom line is to which degree you manage to satisfy those needs that you have promised to satisfy.

Small companies have flat organisations, the decision making process should be a lot easier and they are physically close to the market they wish to attract. Yes, small companies may have less money to spend on large media, but due to their small sizes a possibility to create a near, unique and possibly also an exciting experience for their customers. In a small organisation it should be much easier to manage and perform a consistent branding strategy. The possibility lays not in thinking big, but to think further.

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