Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #9

A brand must have meaning in the local market.

In this age of globalization, many brands that had meaning to customers in one nation find themselves moving into other nations where they are unknown.  If the brand name conveys benefit or use, it helps among those who understand the language of the country of the brand’s origin.  More often, however, the meaning of a brand name is lost as the brand moves to global markets.

If you’ve studied marketing, you probably read about how Chevrolet had problems marketing the Chevy Nova automobile in Latin America.  Since no va means "no go" in Spanish, the story goes, Latin American car buyers wouldn’t buy the car forcing Chevrolet to pull the car from the market.  Although the story isn’t true and Chevrolet did reasonably well with the Nova in Latin America, the story is often cited as an example of how good intentions can go wrong when it comes to globalizing a brand name.

The European mobile telecom brand Orange was created with a pan-European market in mind.  Orange to most westerners is associated with the brand personality attributes of bright, happy, warm, and friendly.  If the Orange brand were to enter the U.S. market, it may face a problem because to Americans the color orange is also associated with cheap.  To Buddhists, the color orange symbolizes the wisdom of Buddha’s teaching which may be a positive brand personality attribute if Orange were to enter Asian markets.

Recall the discussion of Marketing Mix: Product/Service Guide #2, Customers tend not to remember alpha numeric names.  Some global marketers just give up on maintaining the original home-market meaning of their brand name in international markets.  They revert to abbreviations of their original brand name.  The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation became HSBC which is a meaningless collection of letters that has no meaning by itself.  To give HSBC meaning, the theme line, “The world’s local bank,” was developed.  The obvious purpose of the theme line was to disassociate HBSC from the two cities of its origin and to make it relevant in local markets.

More often than communicating benefit or use, global brand marketers tend to associate their brand names with the softer part of brand positioning, brand personality.  Globally successful American brands often have a distinctly American personality communicating attributes of the American lifestyle.  Marlboro, Harley Davidson, Levi’s jeans, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s don’t hide their American origins.  Similarly, in the U.S. market, some European brands retain their home market associations as those associations have meaning for U.S. consumers.  Brands such as Louis Vitton and Dolce & Gabbana carry with them the positive associations that Americans have with French and Italian fashion.  The Bosch and Miele brands carry with them the positive associations that Americans have with German engineering.

The learning point of all of this is that if you’re working on a global brand, consider carefully what the meaning of your brand is in each national market that you serve.