Building global brands

Building Global Brands
In recent years, building and leveraging global brands has become an important avenue of growth for many companies.
Many factors are contributing to this trend, including the explosion in media and global communications, the convergence of consumer trends and needs, and the worldwide expansion of global retailers such as Carrefour and Wal-Mart. Consumers are growing increasingly aware of global brands, and the infrastructure for reaching them is improving. As a result, a global approach to branding is now more feasible and attractive for many companies. If you’ve got a brand with a superior product and positioning, it can be more efficient to take it into a new international market than to create a whole new brand. There are real competitive advantages here. By taking your existing brand into a global marketplace, you have more opportunities to leverage your company’s scale, expertise, and core competencies.You can benefit from the cross-pollination of ideas across countries.You can finetune and continually improve your best practices. By benchmarking around the world, you can also find terrific opportunities to save money and reduce costs. At Kraft, we have been continually working to build many of our brands globally, including Tang, Philadelphia, and Oreo. But not all brands and categories have global potential. Food is more challenging to drive globally than some categories because of its link to local customs and rituals.We have found that categories such as beverages and snacks travel more easily than meal products.
For example, most consumers in China do not have ovens, making it difficult to succeed there with a product that needs to be baked, such as pizza. When we think about taking a brand global, we assess whether the brand addresses a global consumer need, whether it can be adapted to differences in eating behaviors and income in different cultures, and whether the magnitude of the opportunity offsets the challenges.