The accelerating pace of brand building: Another look at the Top 100 brands worldwide

Wednesday, 22 June 2011 03:12

Written by Resti Reyes. Jr.

First of two parts…

Let’s take a look at that list again…
1.    Apple
2.    Google
3.    IBM
4.    McDonald’s
5.    Microsoft
6.    Coca-Cola
7.    AT&T
8.    Marlboro
9.    China Mobile
10.    General Electric (GE)
11.    ICBC Asia (china)
12.    Vodafone
13.    Verizon
14.    Amazon.com
15.    Walmart
16.    Wells Fargo
17.    UPS
18.    Hewlett-Packard (HP)
19.    Deutsche Telekom
20.    Visa

Here are some more observations:

* More than half the brands are tech brands, either I.T. or telco. Most of them are quite young, less than 20 years old. How they have achieved such global prominence in so short a time further underlines our thesis that the old ways of building brands may not work anymore. Or at least they don’t work as well as the new ways of doing things.

Brand building is all about differentiation – differentiate or die, as Jack Trout had taught us. And in a digital world where hyperlink-fast connections are made between brands and their environment, brand building takes on a very different pace. It’s not just super fast, it is also less a matter of physical experience and exposure to the brand, but more a matter of the circumstances surrounding the experience. This is especially true of the online tech brands like amazon.com, ebay, and Google. There is hardly any physical interaction between the ordinary consumer and these brands. Unless you order a book from amazon, you would have no interaction with the brand at all. Similarly, unless you have experienced selling or bidding for something on ebay, there would be no exposure at all for you and that brand. So how come they are among the top brands worldwide?

*The expansion of the digital realm – its steady penetration of ordinary consumer’s everyday lives, also means brands need to adapt. If there is one thing that we have learned from history, it is that technology changes lives. From the advent of indoor plumbing, electricity, the automobile, radio, television, the telephone, and now the internet, humans have had to adapt. So it is with brands. As the media landscape evolves, and consumer buying behavior changes, brands that stick to the old ways are becoming dinosaurs whether or not they acknowledge it, turning into fossils as they gather dust in store shelves.

In the rest of the Top 100 list, there are quite a few more tech brands – Facebook, Oracle, Blackberry, Cisco, Baidu, and Intel. Again, these brands are prime examples of brands that know how to adapt and differentiate themselves from everyone else. And are using technology to their advantage.

*What happens to brands that do not adapt? They are simply overtaken by other brands. And left by the wayside – like road kill on the Information superhighway. Examples include some great brands that were built up over generations of hard work, like Ford, Kodak, Chrysler, and General Motors. They are not even in the top 100 anymore. Instead we have brands like Toyota, Honda, and Nissan, Tencent, Nike, Starbucks and Samsung.

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