YOU NEED MANY DECADES TO BUILD A TRULY GLOBAL BRAND

While we are witnessing global brands being built in shortening timeframes, this is quite a different thing from enduring and thriving over the long term.

This myth is more nuanced than it may first appear.

For a significant part of the past 100 years, building a global brand did take a considerable amount of time. Since the mid 1970s, though, things have been changing and today we find ourselves surrounded by global brands that in some instances took less than a decade to build.

Like the rest of the known, observable universe it seems that the process of brand building is speeding up.

It’s not really possible to meaningfully probe this area without first trying to establish what we mean by a global brand. Many well-known brands might already see themselves as in some ways ‘global’ especially if they are easily accessible online and have at least some customers in different regions of the world. But when we talk about global brands we are really talking about those brands that have achieved incredibly high levels of recognition and are globally present (if not dominant) in all regions of the world. These brands are the giants, the behemoths of commerce and the brands that are seen by some as emblematic of all that is wrong with global capitalism.

For us, of course, these are the brands which have managed to serve more customer needs, more of the time, in more places and have generally done a better job at it than most of their competitors. They may now hold a dominant market position but that is usually a position that has been hard won.

A working definition of ‘global brand’

A truly global brand can be identified thus:

It is likely to be one of the largest brands operating in its category and very often will be part of one of the largest corporations in the world, with correspondingly huge revenues.
It will have high levels of awareness, so whether you live in Tahiti or Tashkent you are likely to be familiar with it.
It will be a brand that, irrespective of where it is headquartered, will earn significant revenues from nearly all of the major trading regions.

This definition is also the one that is broadly adhered to in Interbrand’s league table – for anyone wanting to look at this in more detail you will find many of the brands referenced in this chapter included in that table.

So what are the global brands we are talking about? There are of course brands like Coca-Cola, Disney and McDonald’s. Most people on a high street anywhere in the world would probably come up with a list of ten global brands as easily as they could count to ten. They are ubiquitous; they are so familiar in fact that they form part of the fabric of our everyday lives.

Yet it’s not just consumer brands that have achieved this status. IBM, a business-to-business brand, regularly tops the global brand value league tables; in 2017 it achieved tenth position in Interbrand’s ‘Best Global Brands’ study, with an estimated brand value in excess of $46 billion. Most people in the world are likely to have some idea about who IBM is and what it does. Not bad for a business brand that specializes in technology consultancy.

Some global brands have been around a long time

Let’s start by acknowledging the reality that some of our biggest global brands did take a long time to build. A brand with unquestionably some of the highest levels of awareness on the planet is also one of the oldest, Coca-Cola. This brand was reputedly started on 29 January 1892, which makes it 126 years old. This brand began life in a small store and it is now a global corporation. Coca-Cola’s journey has literally been the story of global capitalism.

Compared to Coca-Cola, oldies like Toyota and Samsung are relative newcomers, both having been founded about eighty years ago. The book Established lists a number of businesses that have been around for hundreds of years. They include Guinness (established 1759) and Wrigley (1886), both global brands. It is amazing to think about the journey these brands have been on. The global events and different market challenges that each would have had to overcome; the willingness, foresight and stamina to navigate each challenge; the inevitable mistakes that had to be endured and the lessons learnt. A bit like an established global music artist, many of these brands have developed and matured in the public eye, growing by finding ways to stay fresh, exciting and relevant to their customers. So if it has taken these giants of branding many decades to reach their ascendancy, perhaps these brands are actually grist to the myth?

Some tech brands are older than you think

This feeling might be further compounded when we tell you that some of our most celebrated technology brands are also a bit older than you might think. Apple, for example, was founded in Cupertino, California on 1 April 1976. That makes arguably the most valuable business in the world 42 years old. Not exactly an old person in human terms, but certainly within most people’s definition of middle age. Of course brands are often long in gestation and it took the return of Steve Jobs in 1997 to really rekindle Apple’s mojo and to turn Apple (along with its employees) into the business that it is today.

Interestingly Microsoft, Apple’s long-time nemesis, was born just a year earlier, on 4 April 1975; even a brand as ubiquitous as Microsoft could not exactly be called a spring chicken.

So if it’s taken the likes of Apple and Microsoft over forty years to become the dominant global players in personal computing (albeit in different ways), is it possible for any brand to do it more quickly? Jobs and Gates took their brands from their parents’ garages to the top of the world. They mixed vision with incredible talent and entrepreneurialism to become the dominant forces in computing and connected smart devices. They saw different versions of the future and both were able to successfully achieve them. Could anyone beat these two?

The mythbusters

Even the achievements of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are to some extent overshadowed – at least in velocity terms – by the incredible rise of Amazon and Facebook. These businesses are relative youngsters, Amazon having been founded just less than twenty-four years ago and Facebook at eighteen still in its teens! These businesses have gone from nowhere to being globally dominant in a quarter of the time it has taken Samsung to become a global brand. That is truly remarkable. Has anyone managed a higher velocity rate than Facebook? Well, both Netflix and PayPal are both (at the time of writing) still twenty, so as incredible as their rise has been even they don’t quite beat Facebook.

Why has that been possible? In the case of Facebook it’s the sheer power of technology to facilitate communication and social interaction. It has grown on the back of an explosion in connected smart devices. As these devices have grown cheaper and more accessible and because the mobile operators are not dependent on the fixed infrastructure that used to hold back developing countries, so more and more people have been able to get connected. Of course Facebook is also highly efficient. It requires a relatively small number of employees to administer this giant of social media. Some may argue that these brands are not truly global as they are restricted from operating in territories like China. Perhaps that is true in absolute terms, but the geographic reach of Facebook and its popularity across Asia is undeniable.

Amazon is in some ways even more remarkable. While it has undoubtedly been helped by all of the trends we have outlined above, it has also made huge investments in technology and physical infrastructure. Amazon made a huge bet on the future direction of retail and it looks as though it was right. Not only does Amazon have a huge business in the US but also it is present in over thirteen countries, including places like India where Prime is now available in more than 100 cities. The e-commerce potential of a country like India is huge. The sheer scale and complexity of Amazon’s business are astonishing. And not only has it managed to continue building its core, it has successfully expanded into publishing, content distribution, TV production and broadcasting, smart devices and now intelligent voice-activated devices. Amazon has probably been helped by access to large amounts of relatively cheap capital and a patient investor community but it looks very much as though Amazon is getting its big bets right.

For anyone interested we urge you to read Jeff Bezos’s letter on the difference between Day 1 companies and Day 2 companies (Chapter 10). It’s fascinating stuff and it is his personal view on the mindset required to stay ahead. Needless to say it says a lot about the importance of staying close to your customer.

The arrivistes

However (and perhaps appropriately), Tesla has managed to usurp them all. Tesla is just coming up to its fifteenth birthday. A quite extraordinary feat, Tesla occupies No 98 in Interbrand’s league table, with an estimated brand value of $4 billion. By virtue of its PR, its ambition and its (albeit not mass-market) revolutionary electric cars, Tesla has become a brand recognized by people across the world.

Brands like Uber and Airbnb are even younger. Uber is just nine years old and Airbnb is approaching its tenth birthday. While their rise has been spectacular both have recently encountered setbacks and neither has yet become a feature of top global brand league tables. It is great to be well known but a truly global brand also generates very significant global revenues. It will be interesting to see if and how long it takes them to leapfrog Lenovo and make it into the top 100.

A word of caution, though: while we are witnessing global brands being built in shortening timeframes, this is quite a different thing from enduring and thriving over the long term. Brands like Coca-Cola may have been created over a century ago but their achievement is to have been part of so many people’s lives for so long. It will be fascinating to see how many of the more recent brands we have covered here will be around in the next twenty years.

It is true that for quite a big chunk of the last 100 years (and even beyond that) it took many decades to build a truly global brand. It has even taken a fast-moving and heavily franchised business like McDonald’s sixty-three years to reach the position of ascendancy that it occupies today. But times change and what was once a truism has now become something of a myth.