Branding & Global Branding

By:1. Abbas M A Fadlallah2. Ashjan Ali3. Anas Abdallah.4. Omnia Ahmes5. Sofyan Mohamed6. Abdelraheem Mohamed7. Abobaker Abdelmahmoud8. Remaz Elhibir9. Hana Murtada10.Suzan Mohamed

Branding and Global Branding:1. Introduction.2. How To build a brand internationally.3. What you need to expand.4. Building International Brand.5. Building International brand awareness.6. Symbols in Global Culture.7. Dimension of Global brand.8. Globate consumer segments9. New opportunities New responsibility.10.Conclusion: Strategies to build Global

Brand.

Introduction• Forty years ago, there were only a handful of truly "global brands"

and they were made up of only the biggest corporations -- Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, IBM, Shell.

• Then a rash of upstarts came along, such as Nike, Microsoft, Apple, and Honda, and pushed their brand reputation further than their actual sales footprint.

• But now that barriers to international trade have come down and the Internet has helped small and mid-sized companies compete on the global stage, building an international brand is a realistic goal for more and more businesses.

• "Thanks to the Internet it's hard to keep your brand just localized. Once you're on the Web, you're accessible pretty much anywhere in the world. It doesn't necessarily make you a global brand but you have to be mindful of the implications."

Introduction

• Branding involves what people think about your business and your products. "Think of a brand as a reputation," says Paul Williams, founder of the international marketing firm, which helps companies build their brands. "Building a reputation in any new market, including overseas, involves a first impression, which comes from the initial interactions someone has with your company, products, and services."

How to build a brand internationally?

What a global brand is?

• Businesses can attempt to shape or form the branding of their company or products in many ways: including advertising, media, word-of-mouth, and contact with your products or services.

• A lot of thought and effort goes into branding, including naming products, designing logos, and ensuring that service is uniform throughout the business.

• Through continued exposure over time, your brand -- or your reputation -- is formed with potential and existing customers.

"A brand is essentially a short cut, it is a way for a customer to

get an instant recognition on what the promise is of a

product or service and how that will benefit them,"

• The reason businesses spent time and money developing brand recognition is so that they can charge a premium for a product or service.

• People will pay more for a brand name product or service if it is recognized as a leader and a trusted brand and they know what they will get.

• Apple, for example, can charge more for its computers than some other companies because of its brand reputation for offering innovative design and quality electronics. The same can be said about Mercedes or BMW automobiles.

"A brand is essentially a short cut, it is a way for a customer to get an instant recognition on what the promise is of a product or service and

how that will benefit them,"

• When businesses try to expand their brand globally, those goals don't change. But there are several steps you should take to make sure that your products or services will have a market overseas, that you can maintain quality in delivering and/or distributing your goods or services, and that your business or product branding meets cultural expectations -- and doesn't insult anyone -- in different parts of the world.

What you need to expand?

How to build a brand internationally?

The following steps may help you in building an international brand:1. Make sure you have a market. 2. Make sure you can deliver.3. Re-examine your business and/or product names.4. Give your logo another look.5. Understand packaging requirements.6. Register trademarks and domain names.

Building International Brand

"It is nearly impossible to understand local culture simply by visiting a country," Williams says. "Find local customers, local translators. Just because you took two years of French in high school doesn't make

you qualified to understand the French market nor do French translations. Just as consumers' needs are different in Rhode Island

from those in Florida and California, so are the needs of consumers in Paris different from those in Marseille."

• In taking these steps to building a brand internationally, it almost always helps to find local resources to help you understand and enter new foreign markets. You might consider entering into business with a local distributor or retailer in this new market.

Building International Brand

• The way to build awareness of your brand in these new markets -- and increase sales because, let's face it, this is your goal -- follows the same formula you use to increase brand awareness at home.

Building International Brand Awareness

"Craft and communicate a message that is relevant to the needs and wants of your customers," Williams says. "Deliver this message in the places they are receptive to it, in terms they can relate to and understand, and through the channels that will truly reach your potential customer."

Craft your message: • Having done your homework and researched the

new foreign markets, and perhaps engaged the help of a local firm or representative, you have hopeful honed your domestic branding for this new audience.

• Be sure to note what the competition and other businesses are doing.

"What may have seemed witty or charming in the U.S. may be misunderstood in your new market,”

Building International Brand Awareness

Deliver this message through the right channels:• Make sure you are communicating your message where it will be seen."What are the habits your customer base in that other country? Where are

they found? What is their lifestyle? What are they doing?" Williams says. There is no secret answer. It's up to you to connect the dots and find the

right approach.

Building International Brand Awareness

Communicate in the right manner:• The manner and tone in which you engage your potential and new customers

is as important as the words you choose.• "Manner and tone will come across through your packaging, advertising,

online, through your sales people, and even the way you answer the phone,“• What types of interaction you will have with customers? What will be the

tone you choose? What types of sales process and policies will you use? Even though you are based thousands of miles away, this is still a reflection on you and your brand. Remember that.

Building International Brand Awareness

• While you focus on raising brand awareness, there is another component to building a brand internationally that needs your attention.

• You need to be vigilant in maintaining your brand reputation in every market in which you sell.

• That gets harder as your business gets bigger and expands into more locales.

Roth says. "Remember, your brand is a promise. You're starting to make a promise that people are buying into and you need to deliver whatever that product or service is.“

• You need to ensure that your customers' experiences with your product, your business, and your staff are positive.

• That extends to how you deliver your product, product quality control, how service is delivered or structured, and how your people act.

Building International Brand Awareness

• In branding, one bad customer experience often resonates longer than one good experience.

Roth says: ." You might consider developing an employee manual, investing in online training for your staff, and/or keeping in check how fast you grow so that you can ensure that you deliver on your brand promise no matter what market you serve.

Building International Brand Awareness

• To grasp how consumers perceive global brands, companies should think about the issue in cultural terms.

• The forces that Levitt described didn’t produce a homogeneous world market; they produced a global culture.

• Culture is created and preserved mainly by communication.

Symbols in the Global Culture

ATL Promotion

In modern societies, communication takes many forms: • ATL and BTL , and, of course, advertising and marketing

communications. For decades, communication had circulated mostly within the borders of countries, helping to build strong national cultures.

Symbols in the Global Culture

•Toward the end of the twentieth century, much of popular culture became global. •Not surprisingly, consumers ascribe certain characteristics to global brands and use those attributes as criteria while making purchase decisions.

BTL Promotion

• Dimensions of Global Brands:• In 2002, we carried out a two-stage

research project in partnership with the market research company Research International/USA to find out how consumers in different countries value global brands.

• A detailed analysis (see the sidebar “The Global Brands Study”) revealed that consumers all over the world associate global brands with three characteristics and evaluate them on those dimensions while making purchase decisions:

Why Consumers Pick Global Brands

The three dimensions of global brands—quality signal, global myth, and social responsibility—

together explain roughly 64% of the variation in

brand preferences worldwide.

The percentages shown in the study are the averages of survey responses from

12 countries.

Dimension of Global Brands

A focus-group participant in Russia told us:• A Spanish consumer agreed: “I like [global] brands because they

usually offer more quality and better guarantees than other products.”

• That perception often serves as a rationale for global brands to charge premiums. Global brands “are expensive, but the price is reasonable when you think of the quality,” pointed out a Thai participant.

•

Quality Signals

• Consumers also believe that transnational companies compete by trying to develop new products and breakthrough technologies faster than rivals.

• Global brands “are very dynamic, always upgrading themselves,” said an Indian. An Australian added that global brands “are more exciting because they come up with new products all the time, whereas you know what you’ll get with local ones.”

Quality Signals

• That’s a significant shift. Until recently, people’s perceptions about quality for value and technological prowess were tied to the nations from which products originated. “Made in the USA” was once important; so were Japanese quality and Italian design in some industries. Increasingly, however, a company’s global stature indicates whether it excels on quality.

Quality Signals

• Consumers look to global brands as symbols of cultural ideals. They use brands to create an imagined global identity that they share with like-minded people.

• Transnational companies therefore compete not only to offer the highest value products but also to deliver cultural myths with global appeal.

“Global brands make us feel like citizens of the world, and…they somehow give us an identity,” an

Argentinean consumer observed.

Global Myth

• People recognize that global companies wield extraordinary influence, both positive and negative, on society’s well-being. They expect firms to address social problems linked to what they sell and how they conduct business. In fact, consumers vote with their checkbooks if they feel that transnational companies aren’t acting as stewards of public health, worker rights, and the environment.

An Australian argued: “McDonald’s pays back locally, but it is their duty. They are making so much money, they should be giving

back.”

Social Responsibility

• The playing field isn’t level; consumers don’t demand that local companies tackle global warming, but they expect multinational giants like BP and Shell to do so. Similarly, people may turn a blind eye when local companies take advantage of employees, but they won’t stand for transnational players like Nike and Polo adopting similar practices. Such expectations are as pronounced in developing countries like China and India as they are in developed countries in Europe

Social Responsibility

• Although we didn’t find much variation across countries, when we looked for differences within them, we found that in each country, consumers held a variety of views about global brands. When we grouped together consumers who evaluate global brands in the same way, regardless of home country, we found four major segments.

Dreamers, Doubters, and Other Global Consumers :

Most consumers worldwide fall into one of four segments in terms of how they relate to global brands. Global citizens care about firms’ behavior on

the environment and other issues; global dreamers

readily accept brands’ myths; anti-globals try to avoid buying transnational‘s products; and global

agnostics don’t regard brands’

Global Consumer Segments

• Fifty-five percent of respondents, on average, rely on the global success of a company as a signal of quality and innovation. At the same time, they are concerned whether companies behave responsibly on issues like consumer health, the environment, and worker rights. According to our study, the United States and the UK have relatively few global citizens, and Brazil, China, and Indonesia have relatively high numbers of them.

Global Citizens

• The second-largest segment, at 23%, consisted of consumers who are less discerning about, but more ardent in their admiration of, transnational companies. They see global brands as quality products and readily buy into the myths they author. They aren’t nearly as concerned with those companies’ social responsibilities as are the global citizens.

Global Dreamers

• Thirteen percent of consumers are skeptical that transnational companies deliver higher quality goods. They dislike brands that preach American values and don’t trust global companies to behave responsibly. Their brand preferences indicate that they try to avoid doing business with transnational firms. The antiglobals’ numbers are relatively high in the UK and China and relatively low in Egypt and South Africa.

Anti-global

• Such consumers don’t base purchase decisions on a brand’s global attributes. Instead, they evaluate a global product by the same criteria they use to judge local brands and don’t regard its global nature as meriting special consideration. While global agnostics typically number around 8% of the population, there’s a higher percentage of them in the United States and South Africa and a relatively low percentage in Japan, Indonesia, China, and Turkey.

Global Agnostics

• Global brands usually compete with other global brands. In most countries, Toyota battles Ford and Volkswagen. Nokia faces off against Motorola and Samsung. Sony takes on Nintendo and Microsoft.

• To succeed, transnational companies must manage brands with both hands. They must strive for superiority on basics like the brand’s price, performance, features, and imagery; at the same time, they must learn to manage brands’ global characteristics, which often separate winners from losers.

One person in ten wouldn’t buy

global brands if given a choice.

That’s an extraordinary

number. Companies must earn the trust of

that segment.

New Opportunities New Responsibilities

• Smart companies manage their brands as global symbols because that’s what consumers perceive them to be. However, people all over the world are either astonished or disturbed by giant transnational corporations.

• Firms must learn to participate in that polarized conversation about global brands and influence it. A major obstacle is the instability of global culture.

Think Gloabalness

Consumer understandings of global brands are framed by the mass media and the rhizome-like discussions that spread over the Internet. Companies must monitor those perceptions constantly.

• Just because companies are globally successful doesn’t mean that consumers have only positive perceptions about them. Transnational companies often have a “dark side” that they must manage.

• In the early 1990s, IBM discovered that while consumers believed the company was quality focused, they also thought it was arrogant and bureaucratic.

Manage the dark side

• Global success often allows companies to deliver value to consumers by authoring identity-affirming myths. Firms must create appropriate myths, though. For instance, the idea of a technological utopia in which personal empowerment would reign supreme took hold in the late 1990s.

• Major technology firms competed fiercely to own that ideal and become the company that people would join with to feel empowered.

Build Credible Myths

• Most transnational companies are unsure how to treat the people who dislike them.

• As NGOs have become adept at staging media-friendly protests, corporations have been working hard to get off the activists’ hit lists. They assign the problem to government- or community-relations directors, who court the favor of NGOs in backroom dialogues. However, these “civil society” organizations are only the tip of the iceberg.

Treat Anti-global as Customers

• While most companies have launched corporate social responsibility initiatives, the impact of such activities is questionable.

• Most efforts appear to be a new form of public relations. Even when companies are proactive, initiatives are often limited to those that are “sustainable”—a euphemism used to describe moneymaking activities that happen to benefit society.

Turn Social Responsibilities into Entrepreneurship

Strategies to Build a Global Brand

Conclusion

5 Strategies to Build a Global Brand1. Understand customer behavior:

Just because consumers have certain buying preferences or habits in one culture, doesn't mean that such preferences are universal.

2. Position yourself properly:Good brand positioning includes truly understanding your competition and then looking at your competitive advantage.

3. Know how your brand translates:A clever brand or product name in one language may translate into an embarrassing misstep in another.

Turn Social Responsibilities into Entrepreneurship

4. Think broadly:Since your company may need to expand into offering new products based on regional market demands, it's important that your company name be broad enough to accommodate those changes.

5. Find good partners:To ease market penetration in global market, good local partner will strengthen your brand awareness and add to your firm a competitive advantage.

Thank You