The Future of Brands

Let me just recap some arguments that Interbrand discussed in the abstract below:
recap the main themes and arguments outlined in previous chapters:


• Branding has been in existence for hundreds of years and has developed into a modern concept that can be applied to anything from products and services to companies, not-for-profit concerns and even countries.

• Well-managed brands have extraordinary economic value and are the most effective and efficient creators of sustainable wealth. Understanding the value of a brand, and how to create more value, is essential management information.

• Brands can also have a critical social importance and benefit in both developed and developing countries. This applies as much to commercial brands as not-for-profit organizations.

• Most of the world’s greatest brands today are American owned, largely because of America’s free political, commercial and social systems. But the knowledge and practice of what creates great brands can be (and is now being) applied around the world.

• Every brand, if it is to be successful, needs a clear positioning, expressed through name, identity and all aspects of products, services and behavior. For corporate effectiveness and efficiency, the brand and its positioning should be used as a clear managing framework for portfolio management and business unit relationships.

• Increasingly, brands require a distinctive customer experience in the round. Indeed, increasingly a brand is that experience, not least through the behavior of its people. The brand should be the central organizing principle for everyone and then everything.

• Every brand needs a strong creative idea to bring it to life through visual and verbal identity. This creative process needs not only innovation and imagination, but also the courage and conviction to carry it through.

• The strongest brand communications may work at the levels of information, fame creation and by creating (often unconscious) associations. Those elements that are harder to measure and justify are no less important; in fact, they are often the most important elements.

• Public relations for brands will succeed only if they are based on the brand promise and the internal reality of the company. People have become increasingly sceptical, and in a 24-hour news culture, organisations have nowhere to hide, either inside or outside.

• If a company is going to invest in a brand longterm, it must give its identifiable distinctive features adequate legal protection, and it must enforce that protection vigorously, increasingly on a global basis.

• Leading global brands can, and should, help the wider public understand the benefits of globalization and free trade. But they can do this only if they open up, behave well and collectively educate about their benefits. They must also ensure they continue to innovate.

• Brands need better and socially broader measures of success. Corporate social responsibility should be about genuinely solving problems, not just about brand reputation management.

• Asia shows every sign of becoming a global brand generator, not only in terms of cost advantage in manufactured product brands, but also because of its heritage in areas such as personalized services and holistic health.

• In a globalized world, nations need to compete with each other for the world’s attention and wealth. Active and conscious nation branding can help them do this, and at its best, it can be argued, it presents an opportunity to redistribute the world’s wealth more fairly in the future.

If the last theme in particular makes anyone baulk, it is worth remembering the importance that China is attaching to growing its branded commodities as its way forward in the world and “so as to benefit the world’s people”1. While many Western nations are fashionably wringing their hands about the nature of capitalism, and about brands as their highest profile manifestation, developing nations are coming to see branded businesses, and indeed their own images, as their opportunity for development and more stable wealth and economic control.

Whether it is ironic or not, Western consumers’ constant search for novelty and authenticity may also help ensure that the newer economies have an interested audience for their propositions.

Sources and more on:
http://www.brandchannel.com/papers_review.asp?sp_id=356
http://www.brandchannel.com/images/papers/future%20of%20brands.pdf