How Internet has changed the game for famous brands

"If Coca-Cola was to lose all its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business.”

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This famous quote is attributed to one Coca-Cola marketing executive outlining just how valuable the brand was to the company’s fortunes. He was probably right.

In a 2007 survey of the value of global brands by branding agency Inter-brand, Coca-Cola’s brand equity was valued at $65.3 billion (Sh5.7 trillion), just under half the company’s true market value. This goes to show just how much of its success is attributable to the brand it has created rather than the product it produces.

Traditionally, brands and brand loyalty were built on standard quality, prime exposure and extended time. You had to have a fairly standard product that was well publicised over a long time and slowly the brand sank into people’s subconsciousness.

The traditional strength of the brand used to be determined by the dictates of being the pioneer vendor with a mass product and massive advertising budget.

Couple that with the growth of mass media and in-your-face advertising and we saw the latter half of the 20th Century create one of the most brand-conscious generations in history.

The successful pioneers in mass market categories ended up creating near cult-like following and almost attaining monopolistic proportions.

If a radio was made by Sony, film by Kodak, detergent by Unilever, salon car by Peugeot, ketchup by Heinz, you had no qualms second guessing its quality.

It was not long ago that the product became the definitive identity of the category – consumers started thinking that all powdered detergents were called Omo, all margarines Blue Band and all cola sodas Coke.

Brands, like wine, became better with age and hence their value as such directly grew over time. It is this notion of longetivity that saw many advertising slogans add “since *insert ancient year here*” to their taglines to prove to customers that they have been here long enough to know what they are doing.

But then the rug of brand positioning as we knew it is quickly being pulled beneath our feet. The idea of standard quality exposed over a long time as the definitive element of a stable brand has been proven to be quicksand as the 21st Century has conjured to create a whole new element of what brand represents.

One of the factors proving to be a myth is that of lengthy exposure time as the ultimate determinant of brand depth and stability. Long gone are the days when the only brands that stood out were from companies that have been in existence for a couple of decades.

Now we are faced with the prospect of overnight successes. Consider a child born on September 3, 1998. She has to wait till September this year before she can celebrate her sweet 16 birthday.

Yet she can boast of being older than Google (at least by a day), LinkedIn (founded December 2002), Facebook (founded February 4, 2004) and a cool eight years older than Twitter (founded March 21, 2006). Even the first iPhone was only launched seven years ago on June 29, 2007.

Yet she will have grown in a world where these specific brands are as ubiquitous and probably just as valuable as iconic car brands such as Mercedes (1926), Ford (1903) and even the everlasting Coca Cola (1892).

# KIM #