Brand Breakout

In its introduction, this very readable book from two professors of marketing asks: 'Will the next Samsung come from China?' However, this is not a book that answers that question. Instead, it takes as a given that Chinese brands will become household names in the west and explores how they will do it. Each of its eight routes to global brands describes a different approach and, most valuably, provides a very rich set of case examples.

The first route is the one most of us will recognise from the earlier rise of Japanese and South Korean companies, the evocatively named ‘Asian Tortoise’. Referring to the rise of Honda, Toyota and later Samsung, these brands went relentlessly through a succession of stages – ‘build to cost’, ‘build to volume’, ‘build to quality’ and ‘build to brand’ – moving upmarket as they did so. The metaphor is pushed a bit too far – I recognise the concept of moving 'slowly but inexorably over land' but I’m less sure of the relevance of 'its short, sturdy legs' and its 'dome-shaped shell' – but the idea is supported by a number of thoughtful questions for executives.

However, it may also strike the reader that this strategy is not constrained to emerging markets – arguably many western brands followed the same path, just much earlier. And this is the odd thing about this book: with emerging markets in its title, and largely referring to Chinese companies, all of its ‘routes’ are branding strategies that are open to any company. These include: moving from B2B to B2C markets; serving your home country emigrants as they move around the world; overcoming negative country of origin associations (jokes about German cooking, British engineering and French bureaucracy come to mind); building on positive cultural myths; and branding apparently undifferentiated commodities.

Even more oddly, for two of the routes – brand acquisitions and building national champions – the authors make a convincing case for why these are most unlikely to succeed, but propose them anyway. However, none of this detracts from the readability of the book, and for most readers of Market Leader its value is twofold. First, a new set of case examples of interesting companies doing interesting branding – if our conversations can move beyond Apple, Google and Coca-Cola then the book will have been worthwhile. Second, a timely reminder that those funny names and clumsily worded adverts you see on Pay TV when travelling are on their way over here and some of them will grow to be serious competition.

Brand breakout: How emerging market brands will go global, by Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict.

This review was taken from the January 2014 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.