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Global Brand Strategy: Unlocking Brand Potential across Countries, Cultures and Markets.
A book by Sicco van Gelder.
Review by Jack Yan There have been a few global branding books of late. One, Donald de Palma's Business without Borders, was a suitable guide for companies leveraging the internet and brought a useful level-playing-field approach to the topic. However, for those willing to look into global brand strategy in depth, Sicco van Gelder's Global Brand Strategy: Unlocking Brand Potential across Countries, Cultures and Markets is the only choice. Van Gelder spent two years writing this title. A member of the Medinge Group, he has frequently distinguished himself with his global and cultural perspectives that are intellectually and intelligently analysed. The book is no exception. It's not to say that this is an academic text. Global Brand Strategy is firmly founded in the real world, thanks to examples that van Gelder has confronted in his experience, or are based upon them. While academics could find considerable value in this text - it is structured logically and a course could be based upon it - it is equally at home on the practitioner's shelf, with its entire final part (Chapters 9-12) devoted to typical brand issues. Before getting there, van Gelder deals with organizational issues surrounding brand: a useful start, considering that an organization must deal with its internal vision first in order to be authentic. The opening chapter is perhaps predictable in dealing with the organization, but van Gelder makes it more welcoming by linking overall corporate strategy to the brand. In this approach, it parallels other great branding titles such as Nicholas Ind's The Corporate Image and Living the Brand; van Gelder additionally injects issues of brand legacy and the global brand organization. He deals properly with notions of brand personality and identity as well as the marketing mix before getting into the bulk of the book, focused on environmental analysis. This central part of the book is the most fascinating and where van Gelder excels the most. While some academic textbooks have dealt with environmental analysis in international settings, such as Terpstra and Sarathy's International Marketing, no one has brought the matter into the realm of the brand. It's particularly vital, considering brand is what links consumer to organization; van Gelder recognizes this by ably vertically linking strategy with the external analysis. Dealing with conventions first, van Gelder discusses three influencing factors: category conventions, needs' conventions and cultural conventions. By tackling these three, he uncovers the unseen influences behind taking a brand strategy global. It is only after dispensing with conventions that van Gelder discusses the brand domain. He takes the position that the brand perception is the starting-point for branding strategies, not the brand expression. This is briefly argued albeit convincingly so: if marketing managers are meant to understand the consumer and make their work market-orientated, then they need to appreciate the context of those consumers. Brand expression and convention are examined alongside issues such as R&D, media and distribution so that the findings may be incorporated into a fuller brand strategy. Further, van Gelder recognizes that each one of these areas is the domain of a specialist, rather than a single, know-it-all brand person. This expression-and-convention structure is followed with the different types of brands when considering their reputation and the idea of brand affinity, or why consumers feel a kinship to a certain brand. While reputation has been studied elsewhere, affinity is not discussed that frequently; less so with the breakdown of eight elements that include functional, emotional, societal and ego-oriented. Finally, brand recognition, another logical element of the external analysis, is discussed with reference to a brand's awareness and its level of differentiation, blending an element of brand equity - normally a consequence of a branding exercise - with one that normally arises early in a brand strategy. All these chapters are filled with real-life examples, many of them familiar to readers, making the text easily absorbed. One might think at this point that van Gelder has failed to bring the external analysis elements back into the cooking pot, for incorporation into the strategy, but Chapter 9 sorts that matter out. Every chapter to this point is brought into a single application of van Gelder's model on how to take a brand global. The finishing chapters are, as mentioned, typical issues in global branding. Global brand harmonization is dealt with in Chapter 10 with more clarity than in any branding book hitherto published, again alongside his model; in this chapter, the reasons for van Gelder's emphasis on external factors become apparent. Determining conventions in the host countries, whether harmonization creates consumer value, how disparate the brand reputation is in each market, and a solution of making use of lead consumers as a prelude to a harmonization effort - all familiar to anyone who has had to work with brands in more than one culture - are all discussed here. Previously, such information was not as cohesively packaged into a single chapter. Finally, brand extensions and brand creation are discussed. While there are books that deal with the former alone, van Gelder presents his Chapter 11 with his model and an eye on global branding, highlighting the additional complexity that the reader may find when extending in more than one country. Brand creation, while admittedly rarer, is bound to accelerate - a point that van Gelder makes quite clear. He does not forget that the successful new global brand has to transcend societal differences, and that it 'must remain powerful or nimble' to face competitors (or changing forces). Palm Pilots and TiVos are mentioned here, again bringing van Gelder's work into the real world. Not only is this one of the most intelligent books ever written - and possibly the only one - on global branding, it proves to be the most convincing and comprehensive. Sicco van Gelder should be congratulated on his authorship and a global brand strategy model that is immediately workable. Of the testimonials on the back, Unisys's Ian Ryder's comments seem most poignant: 'I wish I had written this!' and 'Worth it for his model alone'. They are sentiments with which this reviewer agrees: Global Brand Strategy is the seminal book on the topic. Reviewed by Jack Yan, CEO of Jack Yan & Associates (http://jya.net). Buy this book Links:
Placebrands
www.placebrands.net Global Brand Strategy official site
www.globalbrandstrategy.com Brand Meta
www.brand-meta.com Kogan Page
www.kogan-page.co.uk
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