Note on Global Brands

Consumers worldwide associate global brands with three characteristics and evaluate their performace in these areas when making purchasing decisions: Quality, Emotion related to aspirations, and Involvement in solving social problems.

 This information offers lessons for marketers. First, do not hide the brand’s global nature. Creatively, this might mean referring to the brand’s global leadership position or its level of innovation and reach made possible by its global position. Second, because one key marketing mantra is “be local on a global scale” and many regions favor home-grown brands, it is important to localize some features of the marketing approach. One approach might be to use a consistent global positioning but to vary the name according to the country’s language. Mr. Clean, for example, uses the same recognizable bald man in a white shirt on the brand’s French packing, but the product name in that country is translated to Mr. Propre . Third, satisfy the basics. A brand needs to create differntiation and familiarity while providing the company with the necessary margins and growth.

 Global brands need to deliver customer service that has a high degree of consistency and to communicate this across all customer touch points. For this reason, global brand management is usually a centralized function that takes advantage of all the brand’s assetswhile making sure the brand’s power is not diluted by inapporpriate line extensions. The headquarters staff, business unit management, and global teams or managers are responsible for providing  brand guidelineswithout hampering local initiative. To achieve the “glocal” dimension, regional and local managers need the power to interpret and express the marketing message.

In addition to using a global brand name from the beginning, some companies apply a global name to existing products with different names. Mars, for example, replaced the name of its Marathon British candy bar with Snickers, the name used in North and South America so the company could enjoy the marketing economies and higher acceptance of products by consumers and intermediaries. The drawback to this approach, of course, is that the brand loses its local identity, especially when a regional or global brand name takes its place. In these situations, internal marketing helps instill ownership of the global brand in the country organization.