Increasingly affordable information and other technologies allow brands to be customized for local cultures and for individual consumers. The question for brand strategists is whether, when, where and how to do this. Are global brands merely those that are distributed worldwide, or can 'globalness' itself be an element of a brand's equity?Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research on how consumers around the world relate to global brands, this paper provides a typology of brands and decision criteria for choosing among various globalization versus localization strategies.
This paper shows how the use of consumer based equity measures within a discounted cash flow framework can create a means for both finance and marketing to understand the full benefit of past brand building activities. It also shows how impact of future marketing investment strategies can be estimated using the same framework. The author argues that such frameworks should provide the opportunity for finance and marketing to better understand each other and as a result have a more profitable dialogue.
The paper examines the relationship between brand equity and in-market performance.A comparison of brand equity and market performance shows that mostly brand equity is a strong indicator of market share, suggesting that brand equity building strategies need to be adopted to drive future market share. However there are cases where brand equity does not correlate with market share and understanding the reasons driving the discrepancy becomes critical in managing the brand's under-utilized potential. In these cases, there is frequently a marketing fundamental other than brand equity that can be addressed to help build market share, which can be distribution, pricing, targeting or some other key marketing element.
This paper addresses the role of private labels within the perspective of Western Europe and reviews the main factors affecting private label development within the region, the future of private labels vs. brands, and the impact of supercenters and hypermarkets in the changing equity of private labels.