student :: essays research papers

1Taking A Brand Global Ten travel To SuccessI. Introduction The Importance of Being GlobalA strong spheric brand is a powerful weapon. These days, however, it may in like manner be an of the essence(p) wizard, level as the economy challenges our faith in brands to deliver a profit.According to Interbrands Worlds Most Valuable Brands 2000 issue, for example, althoughAmazons share price has declined, its brand entertain has increased by 233%. On the otherhand, international power impostor Coca-Cola, although still the worlds 1 brand, saw its valuedrop by 13%. And technology brands did quite well&8212 Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and Nokia placedsecond through one-fifth&8212not at all foreshadowing the precipitous crash in their stock prices abouthalf a year after the deliberate findings were released. Overall, notes marketing writer JaneBainbridge in Marketing 20 July 2000, Interbrands second annual study of this kind revealsnot only that global brands are stable assets, but also that the most valuable brands areglobal. In fact, she argues, to confuse a billion-dollar brand, a company has to be global.II. Branding As The New Universal LanguageBased on a recent survey of more than forty-five thousand community across nineteen countries,Young & Rubicam makes a rather startling claim. In its newest Brand Asset Valuator report,issued in March 2001, the firm asserts that brands perk up taken on a godlike status consumersfind great meaning in them and the values they espouse than in religion. As Conor Dignamreports in Ad Age Global 12 March 2001, the study claims that superbrands like Calvin Klein,Gatorade, IKEA, Microsoft, MTV, Nike, Virgin, Sony PlayStation, and yokel can thereforealso be called belief brands. Although Dignam argues against the idea that consumers wouldtreat brands as gods (because they will not be dictated to by them), he does lease theimplications of the argument and make a different analogy. Brands, he says, are more likebest friends, in that they are an important part of peoples lives, do defy specific meaningsfor the consumer, and they are respected or rejected based on how well they keep theirpromises.Yet whether one calls them gods or best friends, brands have all the way started to take ongreater importance in consumers lives. In fact, they have gone from objects with identity toidentities in the guise of objects.The trend has gone so far, in fact, that people are beginning to speak the language of brandsand even to market themselves as brands in their own right. There is more than one book inprint along the lines of Brand Yourself Ballantine, 2000 devoted rigorously to the notion that the