BRANDS ARE JUST CONSUMER GOODS

A 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.

In 1996 Interbrand published a book called The World’s Greatest Brands. Top of its list of 100 names was McDonald’s. It seems extraordinary now but at the time this caused controversy. The controversy was not just about whether McDonald’s was really a greater brand in the world than Coca-Cola, which for many people was the obvious epitome of a global brand and which had longer heritage and greater distribution than the Golden Arches. The controversy was also because some people did not think McDonald’s was a brand at all. In fact, some market researchers told us that McDonald’s couldn’t be a brand because it wasn’t a product. Actually, that was not as daft then as it sounds now. At the time, the popular conception of brands among the marketing and business community was that brands were packaged goods.

A brand was a product on the shelf – nothing else

Unless you literally went into a shop and could choose clearly and physically between two competing branded products in the same category side by side on a shelf, with the same or similar price point, you could not be making a brand choice. You may be making choices based on other attributes associated with the brand name – the fact that you want a particular type of hamburger, the fact that it’s in a convenient carry-away package in a conveniently located store, or that it serves good-value food for the family. But these were not considered brand drivers. They were drivers of customer choice but not, it seemed, drivers of brand differentiation. It was the same for anything that wasn’t designed, manufactured or produced. Banks, airlines, supermarkets. They were all companies. McDonald’s was a company. And companies had corporate identities, whereas products had brand identities.

The Top 10 Global Brands identified by Interbrand in 1996 were: