Figure 6 Goldenballs: How Brand Beckham created value

SOURCE Adapted from Brand It Like Beckham by Andy Milligan (Marshall Cavendish, 2004)

Many brands could do a lot worse than learn from him.

What all of these brands have in common – be they a product or a personality, a curator of content or a corporate service – are the essential criteria for being a successful brand:

First and most fundamentally, they are all trademarks. You simply cannot be a brand in any meaningful sense if you are not a registered trademark. BMW is. Beckham is.
You need to be in a functioning, growing and competitive market. British Telecom was the name of a state monopoly; BT became a brand in an open deregulated market. Even the Beckhams compete for attention with other celebrities.
You must have the ability to trade continually. This might sound obvious but it is worth reinforcing. Brands die when they are no longer relevant and therefore people no longer buy them. In 1996, Interbrand placed Kodak in its Top Ten. Where is it now?

But still the myth persists that brands are packaged goods. An advertising executive said recently to us: ‘You use the term brand like no one else; for everyone else brand means products they buy on shelves.’

We argued that in fact we use brand like anyone else. Brand is what your name represents in the mind of your customer, your employee and anyone else whose opinion about you counts. And that is true whatever you sell.

Further reading