Bite lee a= ee) Brand Management PUM \elelt eel Re a aed a UC Sem eee Daeg Nation-brands of the twenty-first century Simon Anhalt Breaking into the children's confectionery market Re Rc Ue ote NCS ein ney De ein aN eae esd The next generation of brand measurement eee Cte ee eR ned Ce ee STEWART. iterNation-brands of the twenty-first century Simon Anholt Address: World Writers, 182-170 Wardour Street, London W1V 3AT. Tel: +44 171 267 4877; Fax: +44 171 267 6159; E-mail: simon @worlduriters.com Received (in revised form): 21st May, 1998 ‘Simon Anholt read Modern Languages at Ox- ford, and worked as copywriter and intemational co-ordinator at McCann-Erickson and various other agencies around the world before founding World Writers in 1989. World Writers is the world’s only global creative audit, brand naming, ‘multicultural brand thinktank, foreign copywnlting and creative consultancy service. Its many clients include Microsoft, Nike, Coca-Cola, American Express, Sony, IBM, Adidas, Visa, Shell, Levi's, British Airways, Nestlé, Haagen- Dazs, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, P&G, Unilever, Mercedes-Benz and Benetton. Asstract Throughout the twentieth century, most of the re~ ally successful international brands have come from countries that are successful brands in their own right, and substantial transfer of imagery and brand equity can often be seen to occur between the tw. This paper proposes that a number of ‘emerg- ing’ markets, and especially Brazil, have the po- tential to produce global brands, for the following — because there is already high recognition of the brand-print of the country itself; which will consequently support the ‘rightness’ and ace ceptability of relevant commercial brands from that country; — because the economic environment is increas- ingly favouring an export mentality; — because certain groups of consumers in other emerging markets might eventually favour brands fiom emerging or ‘recently-emerged ‘markets such as Brazil, in preference to first world’ nations like US? The paper argues that exporting brands, as dis- tinct fiom commodities, is part of a package of de- velopment which, together, can significantly accelerate the process of emergence from the third world. It also proposes that countries like Brazil have a real chance to join the fist world ‘club’ of ‘global brand producers in the twenty-first century. ‘THE IMPORTANCE OF PROVENANCE, AS A BRAND ATTRIBUTE. Few things in marketing are harder to define than the personality of a brand, and seldom is this task more complex than when the brand is sold in many different countries. A brand is always a complex mixture of attrib- utes: packaging and visual identity form its face, and advertising creates its voice: but its actual personality really only exists in the mind of the consumer. One attribute which is often of funda- mental importance in the complex makeup of international brands is the influence which the brand’s provenance — or its per- ceived provenance — has on the consumer's perception of the brand. A quick poll of successfull international consumer brands reveals that the vast major~ ity of them come from countries which have a strong and consistent international “brand image’ of their own. In many cases the imagery used by the commercial brands is closely linked with the attributes of their provenancert At its simplest level, this association be- tween commercial and national brand is merely a case of positive associations with na- tional produce: a country is famous for pro- ducing certain items, and brands in related product categories profit by association. Italy is famous for producing pasta and pizza, so Italian pasta and pizza brands enjoy more immediate and positive associations than non-lItalian brands; the French are renowned for their skill in perfumery, so it is natural that French perfume brands play on their French heritage; the best whisky tradi- tionally comes from Scotland, so stressing the Scottishness of whisky brands is almost mandatory. PLAYING WITH PROVENANCE ‘Ata more sophisticated level, manufacturers of products that are not traditional national products can make highly positive and valu- able associations with perceived qualities in their national brand, in a precisely analogous way to the practice of brand extensions, where the owner of an established brand can use that equity to leverage acceptance of a new product or sub-brand, For example, Japan is associated in the minds of Euro- peans with high-stress urban existence, but also with ancient wisdom and mystic healing powers: so marketing K3, a soft drink asso- ciated with stress relief, to ABC1 urbanites in Britain, is a highly intelligent ‘brand ex- tension’, drawing on and extending existing perceptions of brand Japan. These associations of quality or apptopri- ateness are powerful enough attributes to make it worthwhile for a manufacturer to claim a fictitious provenance if it appears to lend more credibility than their real prove- nance, It is, in effect, a shortcut to well-es- tablished brand values for emerging brands: by attaching the emerging brand to an area of established cultural reference within the consumer's experience, it can quickly obtain a halo of recognition, maturity and respect. These ‘cuckoo brands’, as the author of this paper calls them, which borrow brand equity from more established cultural icons, are surprisingly common and have been around for many years, as Wally Olins ob- served in a recent seminar.! The Italian confectioner, Perfetti, for ex- ample, owns a successful chewing-gum brand called “Brooklyn’, a product which bears an image of the Brooklyn Bridge on its packaging, and is manufactured in Turin, This bogus provenance no doubt made per fect sense when the brand was launched — chewing-gum was an US import, and its novelty and glamour derived principally from its provenance. Even today, many [tal- ians still refer to chewing-gum as gomma americana or even in some dialects as gin- gomma, a corruption of the English word. In such a cultural climate, a domestic brand would clearly have taken many more years o attain any kind of recognition or brand share. Likewise, Dixon's, the UK white goods retailer, launched its own consumer elec tronics brand in 1982 under the mock- Japanese name Saisho, because it rightly believed that a British electronics brand would carry little credibility. By a similar set of associations, it has been suggested that the US laser/fax supplies and photofinishing company, Nashua, has prospered abroad partly as a result of the mistaken belief that it is a Japanese company (Nashua is, in fact, the name of the New Hampshire town in which the company is located, and the word is, I guess, Algonquin, not Japanese) The provenance of certain brands can also switch with a change of brand owner: char~ acters like Winnie-the-Pooh, Mary Poppins and Alice in Wonderland, once perceived as being quintessentially British, are now per- ceived by children around the world as being quintessentially American; likewise, through the power of Walt Disney's brand- ing, Quasimodo, Anastasia, Snow White and Hercules are no longer French, Russian,German or Greek, but all come from the same global-American culture stable as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. This phenomenon is the converse of the cuckoo brand effect: here, the cuckoo steals eggs from other birds’ nests and hatches them in its own, Indeed, if a country begins to produce and market enough powerful brands in a product category that was previously associ ated with another nation, the perceived provenance of the entire category is Hable to switch: for example, outside Europe, pizza is now generally associated with the USA, simply because so many of the global pizza brands are known to be American, even though pizza was a national product of Italy. Interestingly, this process has not occurred with pasta, perhaps because dry packaged goods have been in commerce, and hence branded for very much longer. Conse- quently, Italian brands had time to become established long before the product became adopted as a ‘world food’. Branded pizza has really only existed for as long as people have had freezers, and most of the ‘Italian’ pizza brands on the market are cuckoo brands, claiming phoney Italian provenance EXPECTATIONS OF PROVENANCE There are, in reality, ewo kinds of brands at work here: private domain brands and pub- lic domain brands. Private domain brands are owned by companies; public domain brands are items of popular or traditional culture which, at least in the strict commer- cial sense, are nobody's property. They in- clude countries, cities and regions, races, demographic groups, even individual peo- ple. Itis a measure of the power and value of these public brands that their ‘owners’ or guardians sometimes attempt to exert the same kind of restrictions on their use as the owners of commercial brands: the Italian re gion of Tuscany, for example, after decades of unwittingly lending its visual identity (cy press trees, winding roads, red-ochre villas) to add glamour by association to automobile manufacturers, is now attempting to protect itself by copyright law against unauthorised use. The trustees of Princess Diana’s estate are attempting a similar exercise, in order to prevent the unwanted association of brand Diana with a whole host of newspapers, gift crockery and charities with a powerful brand effectively borrows equity from that brand and thus enables the marketer to increase margin on the sale, it is indeed a kind of theft. Certain products tend to use provenance within their brand character more overtly than others. Fashion labels and cars, for ex- Since association ample, are very often provenance-linked: pethaps because the concept of national dress has all but disappeared, the provenance of one’s clothes assumes a significance which, at times, threatens to eclipse the power of the label itself. It is almost as im- portant for a suit or a pair of shoes co come from Italy as it is for them to be made by Armani or Ferragamo. Style is expected from Italian clothes, chic from French clothes, hold anti-fashion statements from British clothes, street credibility from Amer- ican clothes, and the expectancy of weather- proofniess from German or Scandinavian clothes is so powerful that the Manchester- based Berghaus company saw fit to adopt an ersatz German name for their brand Indeed, the link between certain brands and their country of origin can become so powerful, through consistent and high-pro- file marketing, that it is difficult to decide whether the perception of a particular qual ity derives more from the brand or from its provenance: in other words, brands can cre~ ate or enhance the perception of a country as much as the reverse. Arguably, the effect of technology-led international advertising campaigns on the part of Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Volkswagen over the decades is now a significant part of the reason why people associate Germany with technologi-‘TABLE 1 THE INFLUENCE OF ITALIAN IN THE CAR INDUSTRY Manufacturer Country of origin Name Italian meaning Datsun Japan Stanza Room (in a house) Nissan Japan Serena Serene Nissan Jepan Figaro Opera tide Mazda Japan Piazza Square (in a town) Mitsubishi Japan Carism: Charisma Daihatsu Japan Cuore Heart Sumuki ‘pan Alto High Suzuki Japan Baleno Lightning Hyundai Korea Sonata Ringing Daewoo Korea Leganza (Eleganza) Elegance Ford USA Mondeo (Mondo) World Chrysler USA Pronto Ready (or Spanish: soon) Volkswagen Germany Palio Contest, Siennese festival Volkswagen German Vento Wind Volkswagen Germany Lupo Wolf Volkswagen Germany Corrado Conrad (man’s name} Volkswagen Germany Sciroceo Sirocco (wind) Mercedes Germany Vito ‘Man's name Porsche Germany Targa Plate (name of motor race) Porsche Germany Carrera Name of race-track Opel Germany Corsa Race Aston Martin UK Volante Steering wheel Renault Fran Laguna Lagoon) cal excellence; the belief that Italians are stylish and romantic is perpetuated in the way that Italian cars and other products are marketed around the world (and not always by Italian companies): in effect, brand own- ers ate helping to perpetuate or create global cultural myths in their own right, Consequently, consumers around the world continue to expect engineering ex- cellence ftom German cars, safety and ecology from Swedish cars, chic design from French cars, wood and leather from British cars, economy and efficiency from Japanese cars: but the almost universal habit of coining Italian and Italianate names for cars, irrespective of their real provenance, indicates that a measure of sporty style or panache is considered an indispensable in- gredient in the brand mix of any car; the habit appeared to take root in this country in the 1960s and 1970s with the Austin Maestro (master), Austin Allegro (merry), the Ford Capri and Ford Cortina, but has since become a truly global trend (see Table 1) It was recently reported that as many as 50 per cent of all new brands in Japan are now named after Italian towns and rivers, although this has probably more to do with the glamour of European-sounding names, the fact that Italian words are not too hard for Japanese consumers to pronounce (like Japanese words, Italian words almost invari- ably end with vowels) and the musical sound of the language, rather than any strict associ- ation with Italian brand valuesBut, despite the evident attractiveness of Italian attributes, and, indeed, the dispro- portionately large number of global brands which come from Italy, it cannot begin to challenge the dominance of brand America. BRANDS FROM AMERICA More than any other country, America ap- pears to be blessed with a huge range of positive brand attributes: one only has to observe its more successfull export brands to see the expressive power of these attributes America is associated with the definitive youth lifestyle (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, MTV, Levi’, Wrangler); with sporting prowess (Nike, O'Neill, Rockport, Reebok, NBA, Timberland, Nautilus), with technological supremacy (IBM, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett Packard, AT&T, Motorola, Intel, Microsoft); America is well-traveled (Boeing, Hertz, Marriott, Avis, NASA, Holiday Inn, Shera- ton); well-informed (CNN, Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, NBC, Reuters); and, naturally, wealthy and power- ful (American Express, Forbes, Citibank, Diner's Club, Western Union). Coming from America even lends authority in areas that were once considered quintessentially European, such as fashion (Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lau- ren, The Gap), beauty (Elizabeth Arden, Revlon, Max Factor) and even food, albeit of the convenience variety (McDonalds, Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell etc). ‘These and many other attributes make America, without doubt, the world’s most powerful public domain brand. This may be merely one of the privileges of being a powerful and productive nation, but it is undoubtedly also the result of the fact that American has branded itself so competently asa country. Brand America enjoys the ser~ vices of the world’s best advertising agency -— Hollywood — which for nearly a cen- tury has been pumping out two-and-a-half hour commercials, which cinema consumers around the world have enthusi~ astically paid to watch, Brand America also employs such high-powered sales promo- tion agencies as NASA, which periodically launches a rocket into space, in order to communicate the superiority of American technology and industry. Consequently, American brands can sim- ply hitch themselves onto this powerful na tional brand, and a cultural and commercial trail is instantly blazed for them around the world. Little wonder that so many brands from other countries are keen to borrow American attributes. There are only a limited number of other countries and regions in the world with clear, consistent, and universally understood brand prints, of which a large proportion are European (England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland). Naturally, they are best understood by their near neighbours, but just like successfull pri vate-domain brands, the key attributes of these brands are known by consumers more or less throughout the world, Whether one asks the question in Australia, China or Chile, the same basic associations exist: Switzerland and wealth, Italy and style, Scandinavia and cleanliness, England and tradition. It is equally clear that other countries are not brands, and have decidedly few interna tionally-understood attributes beyond their immediate neighbourhood: ask 2 Mexican, an American or a Sti Lankan what qualities they associate with Belgium, or Portugal, or Liberia, or Greenland, and their answer will be neither long nor fluent. THE IMPORTANCE OF SWISSNESS Switzerland is in many respects the classic well-established European brand, and it seems that no matter whom one asks around the world, the same set of Swiss at- tributes always comes up. These attributes can be expressed in many different ways,rt 4 TaBLe 2 THE Swiss: ACCORDING To MYTH (1) Switzerland is boring. The Swiss are never lively or exuberant. (2) The Swiss are methodical. They are never in a hurry (3) Switzerland is rich. There is no poverty in Switzerland, (4) Switzerland is efficient. Everything in Switzerland runs like clockwork. (3) The Swiss are diplomatic. They play a key role in international affairs because they are always neutral (6) The Swiss are secretive, Swiss banks are legendary for their discretion. (7) Switzerland is conservative. The Swiss are very attached to traditional values. (8) The Swiss are internationalists. They all speak many languages. (9) The Swiss are dependable. They are solid and srustworthy. (10) The Swiss are arrogant. They think that all these qualities make them superior to other nations. ranging from the insulting to the adulatory, but the basic ideas are always remarkably similar. As might be expected, they are nei- ther particularly profound nor necessarily accurate, and are commonplaces or clichés rather than observations based on under~ standing or familiarity. The principal Swiss myths, as expressed by small groups of mixed age and mixed in- come group respondents in various coun- tries, appear to be those listed in Table 2 As is often the case in international rela- tions, familiarity breeds contempt: the nearer people are, physically, to Switzerland, the more likely these myths are to be ex- pressed in cynical or chauvinistic ways. Peo- ple often argue with their neighbours over the garden fence. The French, Germans, Austrians and Ital- ians seem most likely to turn these ‘brand attributes’ into insults, but moving further and further away, it is found that although they change remarkably little in substance, they are expressed in more and more re spectful ways. Once in North America, Switzerland seems to embody a very full set of virtues; in Asia, the Swiss ‘brand’ appears to be fainter with distance, but the key val- ues are still there, It is most striking how central the image of the impenetrable Swiss bank is to most people's view of Swissness: it appears to be as durable and widespread an icon as cuckoo clocks, yodelling and fondue, and is perceived as being the principal ‘national produce’ of Switzerland. Switzerland, of all the European countries, certainly enjoys one of the clearest images in other parts of the world, and in the context of selling fi- nancial services, certainly che most appro- priate, as the following informal survey suggests.