Top 10 global brands
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SegmentationMcDonald’s main focus is the US, where they spend most of their budget and trial more new products and innovations. The American audience is their largest – Americans spend more money at McDonald’s than any other fast food restaurant in the country. In the US, advertising normally targets children. Did you know that American kids see more than 250 McDonald’s advertisements per year? In Japan, the advertising campaigns are more varied when approaching the demographics, sometimes they focus on children but they also target adults. One advertisement used McDonald´s as a fetish object with sexy girls promoting the burgers, something you would never see in the US. McDonalds a brand that’s been built through strategic marketing segmentation. The questions you have to ask are:
Although a multinational giant, McDonald’s adapts its business and menu to the different countries they operate in. They respect cultural differences and every country has its own policy of developing menu items. TestingExperimentation is vital, and it is often carried out by adding or deleting food from menus according to latest consumer trends and local popularity. In Japan, apart from the traditional menu you can find seasonal and limited-time items such as “The Teri Tama Burger”, served during spring or “The Tsukimi Burger”, served during Tsukimi season (in the autumn). In the US there are the popular “McRibs”, just available for a short time each year. This is a good example of adapting to customers’ tastes, vital when talking about marketing. Experimentation is vital, and it is often carried out by adding or deleting food from menus according to latest consumer trends and local popularity. The Secret SauceIt is true that the marketing and branding strategy of McDonald’s is based on uniformity, no matter where in the world, you will always be able to order the most iconic menu items such as the Big Mac. The same kind of atmosphere and experience mean that your expectations will be fulfilled, because you know what you can expect from the restaurant. Despite its geographic variety the brand is actually very consistent, with a lot of attention to detail to ensure the values are applied globally.
For example, the name of the restaurant is adjusted for the katakana, the appropriate Japanese script for foreign words. In Japan, they call it ‘Makudonarudo’, (マクドナルド), a more appropriate and attractive sound in Japanese. Drink sizes and fries are much smaller than the ones in the US, and burgers are a bit smaller too, to suit eating habits. McDonald’s ensures the correct sizes before exporting for international target markets. Although McDonald’s offers its products everywhere in the world, being the most popular restaurant on the planet, the brand keeps recognizable with its original meaning and identity whilst catering to local tastes. Innovation and CollaborationFor McDonalds, globalization has meant embracing and engaging different cultures while at the same time retaining a strong enough brand to be immediately identifiable. But how can you ensure your brand transcends cultures and regional approaches to marketing? This is where online innovations really come into their own by bridging the cultural and physical gaps that can inhibit connection with a global audience. Make Your Branding Exceptionalblur has helped hundreds of brands source the talent they need to go global. With our sophisticated and effective online platform, you can source marketing and branding talent from across the world, and project manage everything online. Simple, effective and brilliant. You’ll enjoy greater choice, better value and faster delivery. Globally. GOOGLE
Google is now worth billions and has its own place within the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb, but it took two men with a big dream to turn a small idea into a reality that has made a significant contribution to how the world uses the internet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were both PhD candidates when they met in 1996 at Stanford and came up with the concept for a search engine that they were going to name BackRub. One year later, in 1997, they renamed it and on the 14th September 1997 Google.com was officially registered as a domain name. A man named Milton Sirotta was responsible for coming up with the term from which Google was derived (googol), and it refers to the number 1 with 100 zeros following it. The main aim of both men was to organise all of the information that could possibly be gathered around the world and present it in the form of an index, and this is exactly what they did.
When the team received its $100,000 cheque to begin developing this search engine in 1998, Page and Brin moved the operation to a garage in Palo Alto, but one year later, the company had grown considerably and this meant another move; this time to their very first offices within the same city. PageRank Over the years millions of webmasters have tried their best to obtain a high PageRank, which is one of many indicators of the ‘authority’ and ‘link weight’ of any given website, however the term itself was only patented in September 2001 by the Google team. PageRank was an integral part of the core algorithm upon which the Google search engine operated, enabling it to ‘rank’ sites according to authority. It was in the same year that Larry Page, the namesake of PageRank, stepped down as CEO and Eric Schmidt took his place. Gmail Emerges The web-based email service that is now commonplace to Gmail fans was launched in 2004 and it quickly began to outrank the services being offered by companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. The storage capabilities were set at 1 GB - a storage capacity that was unheard of at the time. 2004 was also the year that Google Earth was launched which allowed the earth to be mapped to the desktop using satellite imagery. Mapping the Moon and Mars In 2005, Google joined up with NASA to produce Google Moon and Google Mars in which two applications allowed individuals to navigate both entities from the comfort of their own computers. The project was brought to fruition after a 1 million sq ft development centre was built within the Ames Research Centre. Google Video In 2006, Google Video was introduced to the public, and users were able to search for videos, rather than be restricted to content, through the search engine. This is the same year that the company acquired YouTube, which has in a very real sense become a massively popular ‘alternative’ search engine in its own right. In addition, the very popular Google Docs service was launched. Controlling the Market Share Google is estimated to have around 54% of the market share for search engines with Yahoo! as its closest rival. The search engine gets more than 1 billion search requests each day, and with the incorporation of Google Ads, every click makes the company money. The business is now a household name, and there is no telling where or how they plan on expanding in the future; after all, for Google, the sky is no longer the limit. STRENGTHS Google has two core strengths. Its search engine processes nearly 70% of the world's queries, and Android powers nearly 80% of smartphones worldwide. Therefore, it isn't surprising that Google is the largest Internet advertising company in the world by annual revenues. Google leverages its strengths in search and mobile by corralling users into its ecosystem with useful apps like Maps, Drive, Gmail, YouTube, and Google Now. These apps gather information on users, enabling Google to craft better targeted ads across its network. In addition to selling ads, Google generates additional mobile revenue by taking a 30% cut of Play Store purchases. Those growth engines pumped out robust top and bottom line growth over the past five years. Google's ad-dependent business model enables it to launch free operating systems and productivity software, giving it an advantage against Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), which relies on revenue from paid software. Google pulled all those free apps together with Chromebooks, which are aimed at students, young professionals, and small to medium-sized businesses. Chromebooks only accounted for 1% of the PC market last year, but Gartner estimates that their share might rise to 4% by 2017. WEAKNESSES Google's greatest strength is also its biggest weakness. With over 90% of its revenues coming from advertising, Google is vulnerable to fluctuating demand for its ads. One of Google's most closely watched figures is the "cost-per-click" (CPC) of ads, which measures how much advertisers are willing to pay for traffic. In the first quarter, Google's CPC fell 7% annually, compared to a 3% decline in the fourth quarter of 2014. As the value of Google's ads declined, the value of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) ads climbed, due to its strategy of throttling the number of displayed ads to inflate demand. Last quarter, the average price of a Facebook ad soared 285% annually even though total ad views dropped 62%. Facebook also generated more than triple the amount of mobile display ad revenue of Google last year, according to eMarketer. Google's ad network, which sprawls across websites and apps, is also vulnerable to Facebook's in-app Audience Network ads and single sign-on buttons. The more time users spend in these Facebook-connected apps, the less data Google can mine. Google also has an alarmingly high turnover rate, among both top execs and regular employees. Google employees only have a median tenure of 1.1 years, according to PayScale, giving it the fourth-highest turnover rate of any major U.S. company. That brain drain could cause Google to lose its competitive edge against rivals like Facebook STRATEGIES BEING EMPLOYED Boiling Google’s strategy down to just one thing is impossible, but Internet marketers (and search marketers in particular) ought to be thinking about where Google wants to take the industry, because even if Google ultimately can’t go where it wants, the industry will be changed regardless. Watching Google helps us understand not only where Google is going, but where others might go also. So, what is behind all the actions we’ve seen Google take over the years? Some of the motivations are simple. Google’s revenue is based on advertising, so it needs more and more places to show its ads to increase its revenue. So, expanding its reach through its AdSense contextual ad network makes sense. So does its acquisition of DoubleClick. Both of these moves allow Google to place ads on Web properties it does not own. Similarly, Google has been consistently acquiring properties that serve as venues for its ads, such as Blogger and YouTube. Google has also pioneered new offerings that attract audiences for its ads, such as Gmail. But Google’s strategy is far richer than merely adding new venues for the same kind of ads it shows on search results pages. Google knows that the reason that its ads have commanded premium prices (versus banner ads) is because Google ads have the customer’s attention. When someone is searching for something, they are interested in the ads, while Web surfers might not be. Google understands that the attention paid to a message is a critical part of why it has high value to an advertiser. So, attention is more than real estate. Showing a display ad does not ensure true customer attention. True attention is a function of relevance. Google already commands attention with its search ads, and seeks to create similar relevance with other forms of advertising. The act of searching itself is based on relevance, but Google’s contribution to advertising relevance is the hybrid paid search ranking scheme—they were the first to rank search ads based on the combination of bid price and clickthrough rate. By adding clickthrough rate to the previous high-bidder approach, Google not only maximized its income, but also increased the relevance of those paid search ads. It’s reasonable to think that the gradual increase in clicks on paid search ads is partially caused by the fact that they are more relevant than they once were, and searchers have learned trust them more. But that’s not Google’s strategy, it’s Google’s history. Google has a history of selling advertising that is the most relevant—it’s relevancy is driven by the attention people pay to it. Google’s strategy is to broaden this kind of relevancy beyond search. Google wants plain old banner ads to command the same level of attention that paid search ads do. And the key to that kind of relevance is personalization. That’s Google’s strategy. If you look at what Google has done over the years, it all ads up to finding out more about everyone. The Google toolbar can report search terms and Web sites visited. Geotargeting identifies where they are. Google Analytics reports all activity on a Web site. Google Checkout knows what gets bought. Google Website Optimizer knows which variations of your marketing message work best. Gmail knows what your customers say, even in private. Google might even bid on mobile phone spectrum, which might allow it to know people’s whereabouts and even more of their behavior. And it’s all tied together with your Google Account. Some people see some sinister “Big Brother” aspect to this, but I think it’s just the natural evolution of relevance. Search engineers have spent the last 40 years working on the content, but now it’s time to focus on the searcher. That’s why you’re seeing Google and the other search engines beginning to personalize search results. And it will only escalate—a few small changes to results here and there will lead to more and more personalized results over time. But that’s not all. Behavioral targeting and retargeting brings personalization to banner ads. (Even ISPs are looking at behavioral targeting.) And Google is well-positioned to mine personal information, given how well it has executed its strategy. It’s hard to remember how, just a few years ago, Google seemed less capable than Yahoo! and Microsoft to bring about personalization. Those companies had portals that promised to detect far more information than Google’s simple (and anonymous) search interface. It’s remarkable how much ground Google has covered since, so that today it appears to know more about searchers and surfers than anyone. Could anything derail this strategy? The most likely problem Google will have to face down is a backlash based on privacy concerns. As the public becomes savvier about privacy with each passing year, providing free software might not be enough to persuade people to part with their privacy. Even the work underway is slow because searchers don’t understand the benefits of personalized search. Google is well aware of this danger, so it remains to be seen if they can evade it. It’s always dangerous to attempt to summarize a company’s whole strategy in a short blog post—Google’s strategy is far more diffuse and nuanced than this. But it helps us to try to simplify things to their essence, even at the risk of oversimplifying, because it helps us understand the forces at work in Internet marketing. Understand that what Google wants to do might not happen, but it is certain to affect what others do and what eventually does happen in Internet marketing. If you pay attention to these broad themes as you do think through your marketing strategy, you’ll be more prepared for whatever does come along.
The annual rankings of top companies is determined by a brand's financial performance, its influence over customer choice, and the brand's strength to "command a premium price or secure earnings" for the company. The rest of the top ten includes a car company (Toyota), a pair of multinational conglomerates (Samsung and GE), a fast food giant (McDonald's) and the world's biggest retailer (Amazon). "Many of the brands in this year's Top 100 are so intuitively aligned with people's priorities, that they are able to seamlessly integrate into their everyday lives," said Jez Frampton, Interbrand's global CEO. TOYOTA HISTORY The history of Toyota started in 1933 with the company being a division of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works devoted to the production of automobiles under the direction of the founder's son, Kiichiro Toyoda. Kiichiro Toyoda had traveled to Europe and the United States in 1929 to investigate automobile production and had begun researching gasoline-powered engines in 1930. Toyoda Automatic Loom Works was encouraged to develop automobile production by the Japanese government, which needed domestic vehicle production, due to the war with China. In 1934, the division produced its first Type A Engine, which was used in the first Model A1 passenger car in May 1935 and the G1 truck in August 1935. Production of the Model AA passenger car started in 1936. Early vehicles bear a striking resemblance to the Dodge Power Wagon and Chevrolet, with some parts actually interchanging with their American originals. Although the Toyota Group is best known today for its cars, it is still in the textile business and still makes automatic looms, which are now computerized, and electric sewing machines which are available, worldwide STRENGTHS Innovative culture. Toyota is one of the most innovative auto companies and has a strong culture that is focused on constant innovation. The company was the first to introduce Kaizen, Kanban and Total quality Management systems widely in their organization. The company was the first to mass-produce and sell hybrid vehicles too. Brand reputation valued at $30 billion. Toyota’s brand is the most valued automotive brand in the world. The business is known for its environmentally friendly, safe and durable cars that are sold in more than 170 countries. Industry leader in production and sales. Toyota was the first company to introduce lean manufacturing and total quality management practices in manufacturing process. For some time, the company was the only practitioner of these practices and had the lowest manufacturing and production costs worldwide. Although many manufacturers were able to replicate Toyota’s lean manufacturing system, the company is still one of the most profitable manufacturers in the world. Strong brand portfolio. Toyota currently sells about 70 different models of cars under its namesake brand. This does not only increase brands awareness but also satisfies nearly every consumer group needs. Toyota’s flagship models are Corolla and Prius. The leader in “green” cars development. Toyota understands that environmental friendly cars are the necessity nowadays. Consumers are more selective in terms of CO2 emissions and fuel-efficiency of the cars they buy and Toyota’s early move towards selling hybrid and efficient cars is the strength few competitors can match. WEAKNESSES Large-scale recalls. Toyota had quite a few large-scale vehicle recalls over the past few years. The business recalled 9 million vehicles in 2009-2010 and 7.43 million cars in 2012. Such recalls does not only hurt the firm financially but significantly damages firm’s brand. Weak presence in the emerging markets. Toyota’s main markets are Japan, US and Europe, while such emerging economies as China or India make only a small percentage of all Toyota’s sales. Due to poor presence in the largest automobile market (China), Toyota will find it hard to compete with GM that has huge market share there. STRATEGIES BEING EMPLOYED The Toyota sales figures were skyrocketing, even their competitors were losing out in almost all markets. It is a matter of concern for all the automobile companies to regain their lost market share. Market capitalisation says it all. Toyota is worth more than the American Big Three put together, and more than the combination of its successful Japanese rivals, Nissan and Honda. The Toyota way of production was discussed throughout the world, with lots of research being undertaken. The company's success is mainly due to the implementation of the following: 1. Toyota Production System 2. Re-engineering 3. Superior Technology & Quality 4. Hybrid Vehicles 5. Employee Welfare Costs 6. Employee Satisfaction PRIMARY REASON FOR BEING THE GLOBAL BRAND Riding the wave of twelve new or refreshed products introduced in 2015, Toyota once again earned the title of the most valuable automotive brand in the world, according to Interbrand's 2015 “Best Global Brands” annual report. The company’s ranking jumped to number six, up two spots from the 2014 report. Interbrand estimated Toyota’s 2015 brand value at $49 billion, up 16 percent, another record achievement. "Making guests our top priority, Toyota has done a better job than ever this year of delivering exciting new, ever-better products with exceptional styling, performance and value," said Jack Hollis, group vice president of Toyota Division Marketing at Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. “Toyota's rise and continued improvement on Interbrand's Best Global Brands ranking reflects our guests' trust in the efforts of our dedicated dealers and team members." Beginning in January, Toyota introduced all-new or refreshed versions of the Prius, Tacoma, RAV4, Land Cruiser and Avalon in 2015. Additionally, Toyota is driving towards the future of mobility with the new hydrogen fuel cell vehicle Mirai and the Toyota Safety Sense packages of safety technologies, anchored by automated pre-collision braking. Toyota has also recently launched global initiatives such as the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA), which allows Toyota to reduce development costs while boosting basic vehicle performance, leading to a more efficient and cost-effective manufacturing process. Additionally, Toyota continues to demonstrate how it contributes to society through commitments like the Toyota Mobility Foundation, which helps advance mobility solutions around the world, and the i-Road, which demonstrates an innovative approach to personal mobility. “The Best Global Brands report examines what it takes for brands to succeed in today’s hyper-fragmented world. As people demand immediate, personalized and tailored experiences, business and brands need to move at the speed of life,” says Jez Frampton, Interbrand’s global chief executive officer. “Many of the brands in this year’s Top 100 are so intuitively aligned with people’s priorities that they are able to seamlessly integrate into their everyday lives.” Interbrand publishes the ranking of the top 100 brands based on a unique methodology analyzing the many ways a brand touches and benefits an organization, from attracting top talent to delivering on customer expectation. Three key aspects contribute to a brand’s value: 1) the financial performance of the branded products or services; 2) the role of the brand in the purchase decision process; and 3) the strength the brand has to command a premium price, or secure earnings for the company. The 2015 rankings represent Interbrand’s 16th annual ranking of the world’s best brands. INTEL
In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were two unhappy engineers working for the Fairchild Semiconductor Company who decided to quit and create their own company at a time when many Fairchild employees were leaving to create start-ups. People like Noyce and Moore were nicknamed the "Fairchildren". Robert Noyce typed himself a one page idea of what he wanted to do with his new company, and that was enough to convince San Francisco venture capitalist Art Rock to back Noyce's and Moore's new venture. Rock raised $2.5 million dollars in less than 2 days by selling convertible debentures. Art Rock became the first chairmen of Intel. Download 0.5 Mb. Share with your friends:
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