The accelerating pace of brand building: Another look at the Top 100 brands worldwide (Part 2)

Wednesday, 29 June 2011 05:12

Written by Resti Reyes. Jr.

Last of two parts…

We continue to analyze the changing pace of building one’s brand.

• There is also a growing appreciation for the greater role that Asia and Asian brands are now playing on the global theater. The automobile industry illustrates this point quite well. While the US used to be the dominant supplier of cars to the world, that has long ago been reversed. In fact, most Americans today are aware that American cars no longer dominate US highways. If it’s not the Asian brands, it’s the European brands that are more likely to be burning rubber on Route 66. Drive around the US, and you will likely encounter these other brands more than a Ford or a Cadillac: BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and Hyundai.

•   Brands are built by establishing a strong presence at its contact points with the consumer – and as more and more consumers get pleasant and satisfying contacts with the brand, and repeatedly so, then the brand’s equity gets built up. After the initial awareness and exposure to the brand (usually through some ads), some trials and then eventual repeat usage, the brand gains traction and becomes embedded in the consumer’s subconscious – becoming one of many brands vying for Top-of-Mind awareness in the consumer’s head. This point is best exemplified by the number 2 brand in the list above – and the one that held the number 1 position in the previous four years: Google.

What we find most striking about Google is that interaction with this brand is limited only to people who do search functions on the internet. There is hardly any other means for an ordinary consumer to be exposed to the brand. You will not see it advertised in TV commercials, or in any other traditional media. There are no cute stuffed toys or little piggy banks that bear its name as collectible merchandise or premium items. In fact you can’t buy it at any store (unless you are among the 0.0000001% of the population who breakfast on Bloomberg and buy NASDAQ stocks). And yet, Google held the top position for four years in a row. Doesn’t that say something about the power of the internet as a medium?

•   There is one tech brand that is conspicuously absent in this list: Yahoo! (yes, the name is spelled with the exclamation mark at the end). Puzzling thought. No explanation available. We can only surmise that the brand has somehow not kept pace with its tech colleagues around the world. Fortunately for the brand, the Philippines is still very much Yahoo! country, with most of the netizens carrying yahoo email addresses, and the default mode of communicating while online for most youngsters is the Yahoo! instant messenger service known as “YM”. Chatting – the online equivalent of SMS – has been observed to be the new version of email. Teenagers think email is for oldies, so they don’t use it. Instead, they use their yahoo accounts for instant messaging.

•   There is one outstanding brand that remains strong even though every effort has been exerted to kill it. Everything that can be done to extinguish this brand, including banning all of its advertising altogether, and not just applying it to the brand but to the entire industry, has failed. The brand is of course, Marlboro. It has been many years since anyone of us saw the Marlboro man ride his horse on television, or heard that distinctive TVC jingle – actually the soundtrack from the movie, “The Magnificent Seven” – that singularly memorable melody (for those old enough to remember, you can name that tune in four notes), and yet the brand remains in the top 10 among all brands in the world. It is living proof that a brand has a life of its own, separate and distinct from the product it represents.

Sometimes, a brand feeds on the imagination of the consumer. In this case, Marlboro’s strength comes from childhood imagination. At one time or another, every little boy wants to be a cowboy. It helps explain why Woody is the hero in Toy Story. If you want more proof of this, just read the brand’s history. While the brand is acknowledged as having one of the most macho male imageries imaginable – the Marlboro Man was the definitive macho man for most of the second half of the 20th century, it is hard to conceive that it was originally a brand of cigarettes for the ladies.

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