The article is a version of a paper published in the Journal of Brand Management (2011).

Jack Yan¹
Jack Yan & Associates
jack.yan@jyanet.com

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011

WEB 2.0 AND SOCIAL NETWORKS have been hailed as the next media for marketing, its proponents pointing to the presence of politicians and actors on Twitter and Facebook. Since mainstream media pointed out that actor-writer Stephen Fry was on Twitter, there was a sudden growth in subscribers in the UK. A further mention on The Oprah Winfrey Show saw some talk about an ‘Oprah effect’ on Twitter, spurring growth Stateside. The most complimentary publicity for Twitter, however, was for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, with some crediting the service for his success.
   Each one of these statements has an element of truth to them. There is no doubt that celebrities have managed to harness social media to broadcast to their fans, bypassing the press and setting the record straight. Fans feel somehow connected, as though their idol is talking to them directly.
   The Obama campaign, meanwhile, tapped in to a group of voters who are computer-savvy. The campaign managed to mobilize people who might not have voted, giving the senator an edge that his principal opponent, Sen. John McCain, did not consider.
   But how real are these phenomena and how do they impact on branding?
   Aside from setting some ideas for future research, this paper aims to provide an examination of blogs and social networks, considering their branding potential and what organizations need to consider to build their brands using them.

Why brand online?
The case for online branding has been set elsewhere, with the conclusion that most of the same rules apply. Brands still need to be differentiated and communicated to audiences, and it was found that successful online firms in the late 1990s tended to have strong CEO involvement in their websites.² As the web mainstreamed, countless exceptions emerged: there was no longer a talent vacuum when it came to managing website relations with consumers, and CEOs could step back from answering feedback forms. Staff who grew up in the web era understood how to deal with online questions; databases with copy-and-paste answers were developed; and, in some cases, “knowledge bases” looked for keywords in a submitted question and fielded prepared answers without human intervention.
   In essence, the promise of the 1990s’ World Wide Web began disappearing: once seen as a democratizing force where stakeholders could speak directly to company heads, especially in the small- to medium-sized enterprises that went online in the early days, it became just another medium.
   Blogs were seen as the next step: Chua and Parackal have done some incisive research into CEO blogs,³ which give some leaders a chance to provide audiences with an idea of their philosophy. But in an era of competing media and short attention spans, Facebook updates, fan pages and Tweets became part of the branding lexicon.
   Facebook’s commercial potential was always present, from the minute founder Mark Zuckerberg took the service away from its North American college-campus roots and allowed non-students to create profiles in 2006. It has become more commercialized (and arguably less concerned with user privacy)⁴ since then, in order to capture business and profits through advertising. Originally a site that aimed to connect friends and contacts, Facebook broadened to include groups and fan pages for organizations, creating a closed network of 400 million (and rising) users who advertisers might wish to pitch.
   Many flock to the service. Facebook allowed blogs to be imported, forcing more users to stay on the site rather than go to the source. It gave the impression of direct engagement: companies could, for instance, communicate directly with their supporters. It attempted to bridge the gap between organization and audience again, much like the web and email once did.
   In politics, the author is currently in a bid for the mayoralty in Wellington, New Zealand. A Facebook fan page has been set up, and the same behaviours are apparent: supporters seldom head to email to ask political questions. They field them on his Facebook fan page. Some of his opponents have set up rival pages, and other cities’ mayors and mayoral candidates have done the same in this election year. Interaction is often rewarded with additional supporters.
   Outside politics, the author has observed the growth of the designer Tamsin Cooper, whose Facebook page, set up during the first quarter of 2010, has brought 658 fans at the time of writing. Cooper lives in a town, Arrowtown, New Zealand, of 1,700: the Facebook page has been a way for her to centre her international marketing activities, complementing her website and online sales. Importantly, it allows Cooper to interact directly with her supporters and clients.
   Twitter, which claims to have Sen. Barack Obama as a user—though later it emerged that the ‘Tweets’ were those of his campaign team⁵—is less formal. One user Tweets a statement of 140 characters, usually an update of what that person is doing. In terms of the Obama campaign, the Tweets pertained to the senator’s political speeches and campaign ideals, and followers could ask questions and engage with him.
   It was a masterful use of the service. While it was not Sen. Obama himself on there, it gave the illusion of his presence. It certainly reflected his views. Secondly, his campaign team was careful to follow back as many supporters as possible—Twitter users can see who has become a “follower”, giving them an option to return the favour. This, too, satisfied netizens’ feeling of being engaged: that there was a genuine belief of a two-way street in communication with the senator.
   The desire for engagement is not limited to the United States. The Residents 2010 conference in Wellington, New Zealand, brought residents’ associations from around the country together for a day, discussing issues that were pertinent to them. The Hon Peter Dunne, MP, stated early in the conference that such organizations need to ‘band together’ to fight for their communities, acknowledging that ‘power resides in the community, with their representation and their engagement. Community engagement is not political … local democratization is occurring more in residents’ associations.’
   Showing a video from author John Ralston Saul,⁶ it was stressed that one of the causes of community alienation stems from specialized managers who are employed to solve various problems. But their specialization restricts citizens who have other ideas, which combats the democratic nature that one expects.
   Other comments heard include, ‘The Local Government Act does not empower local representatives to represent local people’; ‘Councils will become less representative, because their business objectives will alienate citizens’; and ‘As [local issues] become more pressing, how can we activate the public response?’
   In another speech, New Zealand’s native Māori population was a victim of “ticking the boxes” when it came to their needs, trivializing and indeed restricting what they were about. (Parallels were drawn with the rights of women and blacks in the US in earlier centuries.) There was a general fear of politicians losing power through engagement, and talk after talk highlighted that engagement was not happening early enough with citizens.
   If there was one sector where engagement was called for consistently, it was in local politics. In her concluding conference speech, New Zealand Chief Ombudsman Beverley Wakem stated, ‘The internet’s tools are important [in describing] how to mobilize and educate people regarding their rights and the legislation.’
   Short of an Obama-style campaign engaging the public, New Zealand’s local political scene was in dire need of politicians and political processes that could engage the public. In the wake of the American presidential election, citizens’ feeling of alienation could quickly be dealt with through social media.
   The author is currently in a bid for the mayoralty in Wellington, New Zealand. A Facebook fan page has been set up, and the same behaviours are apparent: supporters seldom head to email to ask political questions. They field them on his Facebook fan page. Some of his opponents have set up rival pages, and other cities’ mayors and mayoral candidates have done the same in this election year. Interaction is often rewarded with additional supporters.
   Far more trivial, though no less interesting from an academic perspective, is the Twitter account of a fictional character, Jim Keats, from the recently finished television show Ashes to Ashes. An unofficial account, it was set up in January 2010, long before the character was introduced on the show. After the show commenced, the Keats account (at twitter.com/jimkeats) attracted an average of 100 additional followers per week, of fans wishing to supplement their television viewing with Tweeting—even if it was with a fictional person. Very few of the 900 followers the account attracted were bots, surprisingly. ‘Jim Keats’ interacted with other fictional characters on the service, all role-played by other fans. It helped take the programme’s brand on to Twitter and provided viewers with an additional access point to the TV show.
   In most cases—those in which fictional characters are not involved (!)—blogs, Facebook and Twitter are helpful in revealing the thinking of the people behind the brands. They satisfy a need: the desire of engagement with a brand they wish to be associated with, or, to put it in Engeseth’s terms, to feel “one” with the brand.⁷ Their motives are connected to the idea of corporate citizenship and how successful brands promote its ideas.⁸
   Engeseth’s theory is that the separate nature of many brand relationships—the “them” and “us”—is obsolete. Companies need to collaborate with consumers not just for R&D, but for everyday marketing purposes. Examples he cites includes Linux, where the user base collaborate on developments to the operating system and become evangelists in the process. WordPress, the blogging platform, is another. Engeseth also points out that Michael Dell spends 40 per cent of his time dealing with Dell computer customers directly. As does Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea.
   Brands cannot be controlled centrally or in a top-down manner in these circumstances. Coinciding with these developments has been the rise of virtual working, of people expected to unite under a single banner with a uniform brand despite being based in homes or in spread-out offices.
   But Linux is a real collaboration: the results speak for themselves. The real fear with brands in the social networking era is that they will fall into the same traps they did with email and the web, where the interaction with those in charge is gone. Facebook and Google, two brands that rank relatively highly in surveys, are notorious for being opaque: Facebook’s privacy changes frequently prompt criticism, while there is virtually no support for the free users of Google, unless they are lucky enough to find a person in authority. Both companies may provide tools for online interaction that can aid transparency, but neither practises it when it comes to their core products.
   Above, the author has pointed out that Barack Obama’s Twitter account, during the presidential campaign, was not manned by him. Thus, it is as easy to obscure one’s identity with these services as it is with any other medium.

   An analysis of some of the top celebrities and politicians indicate that they are not engaging their fan base, undermining the use of the Twitter service. There is little or no engagement by some of the most-followed users of the service, including Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and Al Gore (Table 1). For them, Twitter is a one-way service, an extra broadcast channel where the relationship with the audience matters less than their own message. However, President Obama, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry have better ratios, indicating more engagement, or at least, a greater intention to engage. (The ideal number is 100 per cent, although this is impossible to expect, especially when a Twitter account acquires mass following over a short period of time.)
   Given this, are they genuine tools for transparency and the sort of “oneness” preached by Engeseth? And what advantages can organizations get from using them?

Brands and social networks
The theory behind social networking is sound. Brands must be genuine. Those that are “surface” are soon uncovered. It is no different from a government offering sound bites that seem pleasant to the public ear, but whose policies differ from the electorate. It is a sure way of being unelected at the polls the first chance voters get.
   By going to blogs and social networks, people can understand the personalities behind the scenes. In fact, this can prove more useful for the smaller organization because the principal can be the one who writes, updates the Facebook fan page, or Tweets. It allows that organization to be more responsive to audiences and consumer demands. It also allows the chief decision-maker in the organization to grasp the prevailing mood of the public.⁹ They are more cost-effective media than above-the-line advertising or even formal PR,¹⁰ and go some way to levelling the playing field for small- to medium-sized enterprises.
   Brands that are unsupported by additional media can fail because they are not letting their stories shine through. The importance of “legends” inside the organization have been shown by many writers and researchers to be important, providing a hook for brands to be understood internally and externally. Therefore, even the less well presented company, lacking the budget to look as swish as a richer competitor, might be able to exploit a competitive advantage by telling a story without the interference of a communications’ department.
   The personalities can come through: a traditional law firm might still Tweet but do so in a formal way—writing in complete sentences, never abbreviating or using internet acronyms, and providing useful knowledge to its followers. It would have to stop short at revealing any privileged information, but its personality can still come through. At the other end of the scale, a musician might provide samples of her work online, downloadable through a blog, and connect that blog automatically on to her Facebook page and Twitter account. Regardless of the situation, a unique voice can emerge, one that is sufficiently differentiated from competitors. The organization manages to solve not only the question of differentiation, but those of transparency, engagement and accessibility.

Issues
   With an increasing amount of activity happening in the social media sphere, it would seem prudent to examine how to incorporate the media into a brand strategy.
   Along with his colleagues at the Medinge Group, the author participated in writing Beyond Branding,¹¹ which dealt with the growing consumer desire for transparent brands. There is nothing to suggest that that desire has lessened in the last seven years: anecdotally, it has grown as social media have.
   It would suggest, for many organizations, a total change in how they communicate, abandoning the top-down process for something that accepts inputs from audiences to drive strategies.
   When many authors discuss transparency in branding, it is not simply about ethics. There are obvious savings in communicating the same message to internal and external audiences. By being open, every audience has the same potential access to the same information. Perhaps most importantly, stakeholders feel that sense of corporate citizenship and oneness, which helps build brand loyalty and grows awareness.
   Issues for practitioners will include:

• how to include this level of transparency into a branding strategy, and whether the organization itself can handle the added work. As part of the vision-setting for the organization, organizations must ask themselves if they desire extra scrutiny. Questions will include whether principals are willing to schedule in regular entries on to a corporate blog, and work alongside their communications’ department. The structure is flatter. They might want to consider whether they wish to read the feedback personally. Ideally, they will need to ensure that it is their voice and not one that has been too sanitized by communications. The organization has to consider whether these statements appear in a corporate account or a personal one, and the relationship between the two;
• it will have to look at researching its audiences and whether they demand the level of interaction that social media provide. Some businesses might not need it because their audiences are not connected online: those targeting elderly audiences might find conventional media to be more useful. The author notes that a growing number of clients are finding that their audiences are demanding, at the last, a Facebook presence;
• the organization will have to look at extending the rules surrounding its brand usage in to new media. It will also have to consider whether it is to influence the appearance of personal accounts. If personal blogs and Twitter accounts have already been set up before the organization has created its own, it needs to ask itself how official they are;
• the organization needs to consider how to measure the success of branding in social media, either through surveys on whether audiences believe transparency has increased, or using other measures, such as brand equity constructs, revenue, market share, or follower or fan numbers.

Challenges to transparency
   Labour malpractices, child exploitation and environmental harm have nothing to do with branding, even if, in the eyes of Klein¹² or Quart,¹³ the profession is complicit. Equally, the misuse of blogs and social media are not due to any inherent problem with the platforms. If certain parties choose to use Twitter as a one-way channel, then it is their choice: there is no rule book that governs the service. But it would be a wasted opportunity, doing little to promote interaction and understanding audiences. Instead, those that use the technologies as top-down media risk making themselves look separate, going against transparency and oneness. In an era when both are valued, the brand, whether personal or organizational, is weakened through appearing “above” one’s supporters.
   Secondly, there is the problem of having someone other than the claimed person behind the blog, Facebook or Twitter account. The organization should ensure that in the case of a shared blog or Facebook fan page, the identity of the writer is known; but ghost-written media can prompt criticism; this can only undermine the brand.¹⁴
   The looming problems are also technological. Each medium starts off being exclusive. The programming that appears on that medium appeals to that exclusive audience. But as it mainstreams, that exclusivity is lost.
   For the most part, there is nothing wrong with this diffusion of an innovation. Television would be useless if TV sets cost the equivalent of a motor car; motor cars would have failed to transform society if they remained the playthings of the rich.
   But with the democratization of technologies, they have become utilitarian. Email was once exclusive; it is now a tool, with few business people using it for leisure as they did 20 years ago. Along the way, spam threatened to make email useless; email newsletters risk being caught in spam filters.
   The same tendencies are emerging in the blogosphere, with some websites generating fake entries. Blogger, the blogging platform owned by Google, has been using a bot to detect fake blogs that are created using automated scripts. A small percentage of legitimate blogs have been deleted including, for a brief period in 2010, one for the respected UK firm Minale Tattersfield, which was out of action for two weeks. Vox, the blogging service owned by Californian firm Six Apart, is a target of many “sploggers” (spam bloggers).
   Twitter, which is much harder to patrol and easier to manipulate, has its share of fake accounts, with programs adding followers and Tweeting fake messages. Reports of Twitter’s growth stagnating have surfaced in the technological press during 2009 and early 2010.¹⁵
   Facebook, meanwhile, is turning off a small minority of users fed up with its privacy changes—although the carrot of 400 million users is too great for many organizations to abandon it.
   All may well turn users away at some point, especially when they feel they can no longer have the sense of engagement and oneness with the brand.
   Therefore, while these tools are useful, they may well be replaced by others in the 2010s. Perhaps those tools will integrate visuals and the person’s voice, things that are (at this point) harder to automate. For now, they are real, and they need to be considered in a branding strategy.

Conclusion
   Audiences have demanded greater ethics and transparency from brands for many years. However, that demand has become far louder as audiences found their voices through the internet, in particular, driving a greater awareness of social responsibility in the 2000s. Alongside those demands have been ones for transparency, forcing organizations to work more closely with their audiences. People want to know that they have some influence over the brands they connect with.
   As technologies change, social media are where audiences can interact with those brands. They have their pitfalls, with many organizations not building them into their overall branding strategies, or failing to use them to interact. In neither case is transparency increased. Technological problems limit their appeal.
   Nevertheless, if used correctly, blogs and social media can be useful tools for differentiation as they allow a company’s personality to shine through. They also provide means for audiences to engage and access brands. Importantly, they can provide greater transparency, a behind-the-scenes look at the thinking of organizations, giving their brands greater relevance and appeal.

Notes
   1. LLB, BCA (Hons.), MCA. CEO, Jack Yan & Associates (http://jya.net); Founding Publisher, Lucire (http://lucire.com); Director, the Medinge Group (http://medinge.org). Copyright ©2010 by Jack Yan & Associates. All rights reserved.
   2. J. Yan: ‘Online Branding: an Antipodean Experience’, in Kim, Ling, Lee and Park (eds.): Human Society and the Internet. Berlin: Springer 2001, pp. 185-202.
   3. A. P. H. Chua, and M. Parackal: ‘Co-creating value through corporate blogs: a proposed research framework’, 5th National Conference on Computing and Information Technology (NCCIT), Bangkok, Thailand, May 22-3, 2009.
   4. B. Krishnamurthy and C. E. Willis: ‘On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks’, Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN), Barcelona, Spain, August 17, 2009.
   5. M. Kirkpatrick: ‘Obama: “I have never used Twitter”‘, ReadWriteWeb, November 15, 2009, <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_i_have_never_used_twitter.php>.
   6. Cf. J. R. Saul: The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin 2006.
   7. S. Engeseth: One: a Consumer Revolution in Business. London: Cyan-Marshall Cavendish 2005.
   8. N. Ind and R. Bjerke: Branding Governance: a Participatory Approach to the Brand Building Process. Chicester: J. Wiley & Sons 2007, pp. 51-7.
   9. An example of a responsive CEO is Christian von Koenigsegg, who made modifications to his company’s sports car after criticism on the TV show Top Gear. A new model was ready for testing within weeks. A larger company would have added the criticism to a longer improvement cycle and the modification might not have been seen for years.
   10. S. Engeseth: The Fall of PR and the Rise of Advertising. Stockholm: Stefan Engeseth Publishing 2009.
   11. N. Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands. London: Kogan Page 2003.
   12. N. Klein: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador 2000.
   13. A. Quart: Branded: the Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing 2003.
   14. Especially in politics: opponents of the two high-profile politicians in the 2008 US presidential election, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, flung accusations about ghost-writing.
   15. D. Gross: ‘Has Twitter peaked?’, CNN.com, January 26, 2010, <http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/26/has.twitter.peaked/index.html>.

The Journal of the Medinge Group, vol. 3, no. 1, 2009

Expanded from the Global MDP presentation given by the author to the Proton Business School, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India, December 26, 2008.

NATION BRANDING is not a new concept. Countries have attempted to market themselves for the sake of their tourism for decades, usually in a piecemeal fashion. In more recent times, it was Wally Olins’s Trading Identities (1) and Simon Anholt’s Brand New Justice that looked at nation branding (2) with a more strategic eye.

Despite these two texts, nation branding is still not practised strategically. Generally, there is no leadership when it comes to nation branding: it is not driven top–down by the head of state (interestingly, one could argue that in the days of warring emperors, it was); and there is confusion about which department should be the one that handles it. Is it a matter of tourism, of commerce, or some other department?

In the United States, which tends to score poorly in terms of cultural heritage in the Anholt Nation Brands’ Index (3), there is—tellingly—no department devoted to marketing the country. The United Kingdom has not fully shaken its image of cobbled streets and double-decker buses for many tourists—despite Tony Blair’s insistence early in his first term that he wished for the country to have a ‘Cool Britannia’ slant. It, too, has failed to get very far with various branding efforts including its ‘UK OK’ logo earlier in the 21st century.

About the only successful one that comes to the author’s mind among the First World is that of Canada, which began its efforts in the 1980s, consisting of the simple word Canada typeset in Baskerville, and a small Canadian flag in the top right-hand corner. Canada does not seem to realize this is a brand: it tries to create different ones for the tourism sector and for agriculture. However, the Canada brand appears on everything from plastic bags from its embassies to Canadian-filmed movie credits.

Asian and Pacific countries that have largely tried to brand their nations, sometimes successfully thanks to an approach that tries to get everyone involved.

Asia is, by no means, fully successful in nation branding. A South Korean campaign in 2001 to encourage tourism was, strangely, internally marketed, and little of its effort was externally directed. However, Malaysia has been mildly successful at least in tourism terms, using a conventional marketing mix. Taiwan has tried to market itself separately of its political concerns, creating a distinctive Taiwan script that has appeared in its tourism marketing and at its economic offices—its de facto embassies around the world. It would also be fair to say that the flag of Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region is part of a brand—without getting in depth into the connections between flags and brands—when it was conceived in the 1990s for its first day of official usage on July 1, 1997.

In Oceania, New Zealand has been acclaimed and criticized for its 100% Pure campaign. On the one hand, riding on the wave of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy that was filmed there, the campaign became very well known. The flip side is that, as with many nation-branding efforts, 100% Pure fails to extend itself to high-tech ventures or the fashion sector, centring on primary products and tourism. Critics also point out that France spends more on the environment as a percentage of GDP than New Zealand.

However, what has impressed the author is the nation branding of India, a fact that surprises some Indians. But Incredible India, launched in 2002, has had far-reaching effects, not just because it has been successful in tourism marketing—the campaign is seen around the world through traditional media—but because there are signs that Indians truly “live the brand” (4). There are, additionally, signs that the Indian nation brand has crept in to many contact points with its audience, from bureaucracy to the nation’s cosmopolitanism.

Good brands should be able to cover an organization—and in this case a nation—when there are unexpected disasters. The events of November 26, 2008, when Mumbai was the target of attacks by terrorists, have actually not hurt India’s national standing. This chapter deals with some of these points and, more importantly, just how well India is positioned for nation branding in the 21st century.

First, the scene needs to be set.

The bigger trends in the Zeitgeist
It is no secret that for the last 20 years, there has been a greater questioning of the capitalist system. Over the course of 2008, more than one person has raised the subject of the fictional Gordon Gecko character, a shady trader in Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street. Gecko exemplified excess and greed. There is talk of a sequel to the movie, with Gecko coming out of jail and carrying on with his greedy ways. It was, unfortunately, not clear to all who saw the original film that Gecko wound up in prison because of his corrupt behaviour (5).

When Michael Lewis wrote his book, Liar’s Poker (6), revealing some of the illogical, rhetoric-based decision-making on Wall Street, he expected he could turn students away from being traders. Instead, he began receiving mail from American students wanting to know if he had more tips to trick the system (7).

Those students have now grown up and have probably been behind the derivatives’ and sub-prime mortgage mess that has the western world worried. That means there is a vacuum for some form of business leadership to emerge. And that leadership might emerge from India.

In 1987, with the stock market crash then, some blame was levelled at the Black–Scholes–Merton formulas that encouraged traders to take greater risk than they rationally would. If one could see through this, and raised alarm bells, one might have been ignored because of the way the system institutionalized the behaviour. But rather than abandon the system, the west continued with it (8).

We also saw the mortgage mess unfold largely because ratings’ agencies were complicit in renaming insecure assets as AAA-rated bonds.

When Reader’s Digest did a poll in different countries about their preference for US president, an overwhelming majority indicated then-Sen. Barack Obama (9). This was not so much because they were well informed about George W. Bush or John McCain. On the contrary. The bigger picture is a worldwide shift from the technocracy (10) because people are beginning to see, in a more connected world, just what globalization is doing to people, and it was tempting to connect the Bush administration with the technocratic developments of the last century. This is why there is dissatisfaction in the west with governments and big business: a sense that democratically elected representatives are out of touch with the reality seen by everyday people. The reality is no longer one delivered by mainstream, “old” media, but one where citizens have sought information for themselves thanks to the internet.

People can read first-hand through the blogosphere how host countries have suffered through corporate expansion. They have seen the sweatshops and, in some cases, have exposed them. They see all this is tied in to predominantly US corporate interests, in a corporate system built on arrogance, one that its car industry, in particular, has been built upon.

If one is the superpower, one has a responsibility to lead morally, ethically and transparently, and with the US’s failure to do so, and with a 43rd president whose world-view was likely based upon a technocratic perspective, then of course there was a shift away from it. The question we must have at the beginning of the Obama era is how much change he trulyrepresents—and just how India might fit in to this new world.

Consumer democratization
No wonder there has been a postmodern questioning of everything from finance to branding. In the late 1990s, Naomi Klein’s No Logo (11) became a movement in its own way. It is ironic, because to solidify the movement, it had to adopt the practices of branding. Which leads to this next point: the tools aren’t faulty, but the motives behind their use are.

You can even see the double-edged sword with the internet. Fifteen years ago, it was dominated by American surfers. In the author’s own experience, in 1998, 70 per cent of the internet public to an English-language site was American. Non-Latin language support on the internet was appalling. Opinions reflected a model of globalization but an inherently western, technocratic one. Global voices were not truly being heard.

Fortunately, since then, the web has given many people who otherwise did not have a voice a medium through which to speak. Rather than get a technocratic view, one where corporations have been getting their way over the citizens of the host country, or even governments, there are now individual human voices in the global village. Harvard University’s Global Voices project often scours the internet for individual opinions (12). Al-Jazeera English’s Listening Post invites them from people with a webcam (13). And the blogosphere has been incredibly valuable for understanding first-hand viewpoints on topics such as the war in Iraq, and how it actually influences families. On a more positive note, websites like Kiva.org, which won a 2009 Brands with a Conscience award, brings together western loans and individual businesses in developing countries.

So the shift online, in a medium that is an interesting microcosm of the “real” world, albeit with more adult websites, does seem to be heading eastward, and that is potentially a good sign.

The internet no longer has a 70 per cent US audience. The US perhaps makes up a fifth. Red China has overtook the US in 2007 and it increased its lead in 2008. But how much of the Chinese growth is sustainable as the country becomes affected by the global credit crunch? Was such a quick leap forward on the internet a worthwhile development?

India in the global context
The west is in disarray, or at least, it is feeling uncertain. It can emerge as a better society if it does its soul-searching accurately. But it will keep sinking if it believes that its current troubles are fleeting and it can sink back into its old behaviours again. After 9-11, one might have expected people to have soul-searched in occidental countries—but as the sub-prime mortgage and derivative mess has illustrated, little soul-searching took place. The behaviours, as even President George W. Bush said in his final address from the East Room of the White House, went back to what they were before 9-11.

So we have these forces already at play, including an eastward shift in influence. If the internet is a representation of the real world, then India is a country growing hugely in stature. It might not dominate online (14), but Indian businesses and events are coming to the fore as far as the Zeitgeist is concerned.

It is not just in tragedies as the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which occupied news headlines globally for a week. After a few years of rediscovering Chinese film-making, Indian film-making is becoming more notable, even mainstream in the west. Films that rely less on ethnic and almost comedic to stereotypical Indian ideas (e.g. The Guru, Bride and Prejudice) are showing more regularly in occidental countries, including co-productions such as the Hindi film Chandni Chowk to China(15). There is hardly anyone who has not heard of actress Aishwarya Rai. There are many people who have heard of Tata or Mr Ratan Tata. India is no longer a country that just makes Hindustan Ambassadors, but the nation behind innovations such as the Tata Nano and the ownership of Jaguar and Land Rover.

Branding is the ways in which an organization communicates, symbolizes and differentes itself to all of its audiences (16). And branding, being the interface between organization and audience, or company and consumer, or even management and staff, therefore becomes a very important tool.

In the past few years, India has marketed itself admirably. The tourist bureau’s Incredible India campaign does reach many nations. Seven years on, it has gained momentum and is instantly recognizable. But importantly, it is founded in reality.

While any country can claim to be incredible and use superlatives, few have the belief of athithi devo bhava. As a principle, it serves the tourism market well. But it serves many sectors well, too.

Those who have never considered India as a tourist destination are changing their minds. India’s former president, the Hon. Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, has got behind the campaign and mentioned it regularly in speeches—a real sign of an approach that is being pushed from the top, inspiring other government departments. India is, to the author’s knowledge, one of the very few nations that puts the Incredible India logo on its immigration forms when people enter the country—a connection to the positive equity that the campaign has created. Licensed tour guides feature the logo on their business cards, where it works as not just a reminder but an endorsement mark. This sort of integration with the nation’s branding campaign is rare. Certainly nothing about entry into Great Britain reminds one of Cool Britannia; nothing on the forms on New Zealand’s arrival uses 100% Pure. Malaysia and Korea are as “official” as ever; the United States even more so.

As a result of the campaign, many know of India’s image with its beauty—while the Taj Mahal is a famous landmark, there are as many who might target Goa as a perfect getaway.

People know of India, too, as a modernizing, quickly developing country—though the skyscrapers of Gurgaon still come across as a pleasant surprise. The surprise comes because there are still some negative images that Incredible India has not yet addressed. Commerce, for instance, has not relied fully on the nation brand, because it sense it is not the right time to. Some of these corporations, outside the tourist sector, may well be right, but price competition is not exactly the best strategy, either.

It is perfectly natural to market on a price basis: after all, many Indian companies have succeeded because of this. They have capitalized on some basic factors such as the strong take-up of the internet, the usage of English as the lingua franca of business, and price. But price competition only gets one so far, because it is somewhat dependent on first-world nations being customers seeking lower costs. All it will take to end this strategy is another country coming in and undercutting that—and in his election campaign, appealing to nationalism, Barack Obama has said he does not favour continued outsourcing to Asia, though politics have a funny way of changing people’s minds when they are in office.

Readers may be aware of firms that have leveraged themselves so heavily on overseas customers that they have found it hard to deal with downturns in the western economy.

Global competition necessarily takes several forms: head-to-head, flanking, encirclement or bypassing (17). The trick is to find a particularly Indian model of doing it, rather than emulate the west (18).

Indian firms such as the Tata Group have taken a hands-off approach to their foreign units, which is not a bad thing. But only for the time being. The situation is bound to change.

A longer-term view is that Indian companies can leverage themselves against the nation brand. This will take some decades: while the author paints a positive image of India today, there are still old images that need to be erased fully.

If one takes Hong Kong as an example, western filmmakers still showed pictures of junks as late as the 1980s to “set the scene”, even though the former British colony, by then, was a modern metropolis. In fact, some Hong Kong citizens of a certain age might never have seen a junk. It was only in the late 1990s that Hong Kong’s skyscrapers were commonly seen in the opening sequences. India is still dogged by some associations of auto-rickshaws by Bajaj and the cruel stereotype of “Delhi belly”, neither of which help the high-tech and increasingly world-class image.(19) Time will bring the image in line with reality.

Indian education, its service industry, its pride and nationalism, and other images that form its reality need to be incorporated into the Incredible India campaign. Unwittingly, the Indian government’s push to have CNG-powered public transportation is miles ahead of many western nations (20), something that speaks well about the nation and its environmental concern. This fact is hardly ever mentioned externally, yet is impressive to a world that is becoming increasingly eco-conscious.

The wider context of this move is India’s readiness to have public–private partnerships in advancing the country (21) —hence it is easy to not only recommend but predict a wider application of Incredible India—rather than the monetarist policies of the west that have landed it into such deep trouble.

November 26
American media were philosophical after 9-11, yet American reaction was divisive. One of the author’s colleagues reported a 2001 incident where an Arab–American was asked to leave a café simply for reading a newspaper printed in Arabic script.

No such race-based panic followed in India after the terrorist attacks of November 26, 2008. While it was believed that militants trained in Pakistan were responsible, most Indians accepted they were not agents of the Pakistani state. Indian media, too, were philosophical. While there were the usual signs of heightened security, India’s more multicultural heritage ensured that there were no attacks aimed at Pakistani expatriates or those practising the Muslim faith. Services held following 26-11 were inclusive, with Mumbai’s many faiths: Hindi, Sikh, Muslim, Jewish, Christian and others all held ceremonies to honour the victims.

The contrast has worked in India’s favour. The Indian brand has not been harmed by the incident, and the way Indians have approached 26-11 has probably improved perceptions.

One lesson can be taken from 9-11: it did not diminish the impression people held of Manhattan. American foreign policy diminished impressions of the country as a whole, but New York City largely maintained the image it had prior to the attacks. The reason: the act of terror was not committed by New Yorkers or Americans. Similarly, the act of terror in Mumbai was not committed by Mumbaikers or Indians.

Red China’s folly
It is not only the west that has proved troublesome. Red China serves as a warning and a contrast. It has been cited often by “experts” as being the country ripe for foreign direct investment. But it is a willing part of the economic establishment, trying to play the technocratic game its own way through price but not innovation. Indian businesses themselves find competing with Chinese firms on price to be an unwise game. Those same Indian firms realize that the quality of Chinese goods is inferior, yet little marketing has been done to tell the world that Indian manufacturing can be world-class. Brands like Haier may have a tenuous historical connection to Germany but the Chinese-made products have proved to be more troublesome than, say, Fisher & Paykel’s. The chairman of Toyota, Okuda Hiroshi, believes Indian manufacture to be superior to Chinese manufacture, for example, and could possibly overtake Japan in quality terms, and Hyundai has seen fit to source the i10 model exclusively from its Indian plant.

But Red China’s problems go further. Where is, one might ask, the goodwill of the Beijing Olympics? While Sydney has been able to hold on to its goodwill after hosting the 2000 Summer Games, Beijing has not remained on a high after its turn in 2008 as it increases its media and internet censorship now that most of the foreign journalists covering the event have gone. The period leading up to the Games stressed again the plundering of Red China’s environmental resources, especially its freshwater, doing little for the Chinese national brand, or any organizations that depend on not only ‘Made in China’ but ‘Owned in China’.

China, through state-owned corporations, may have bought the MG and Rover car companies but has it innovated? Not really: it has followed the model of the west, putting sustainability very low on its list.

Yet countries like New Zealand and Australia have pursued free-trade deals with a régime that cannot even give its people self-determination, a foundation principle of the UN Charter. Australia, in its defence of its trading partner, protested the US–India free-trade pact. Both Australia and New Zealand have pursued free-trade deals with a régime that does not respect intellectual property, has a record of wishing to dominate the manufacturing of its trading “partners”, and has a questionable record in human rights.

Red China does not have a common law system or English as a lingua franca.

The excuse that its one billion consumers are a market for Australia or New Zealand is unconvincing, especially when India is sitting right here as a ready-made trading partner.

The 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, while reaching fewer people than the Olympics, is an opportunity for India to not make the same mistakes that Red China has with Beijing. It is hard to consider that it would, however, not just because of its democracy and constitution, but because of India’s respect for its history—something that Red China ignored for decades, reaching a low with the Cultural Revolution, and is desperately trying to recapture.

By contrast with Red China, India innovates and protects its intellectual property. India has been more conscious of its ecosystem. India has been spending more to help some of its farming communities, rather than rape the land.

India’s aim of sustainable tourism has not quite been realized—there are obviously still environmental problems throughout the country—but campaigns such as ‘Colour of India’ and highlighting wellness as part of Incredible India are a worthwhile aim as the world, rejecting the technocratic abuse of the planet. They embrace environmental and ecological principles. Where better than to learn from a country that has had such a long history—and one that has managed its farmland far better since independence in 1947 than Red China has since the communist occupation in 1949?

India’s common law heritage is one that is shared or at least related with the systems of the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. And while India has not pursued affluence in the way Red China has, at least India will not be as subject to the financial mood swings of the west. It is, as an independent economy, more stable in its growth.

It has a nation brand that is already paving the way for Indian commerce. In time, that brand must extend itself further because the necessity will emerge, particularly through groups such as Tata and its Jaguar Land Rover division (22). India obviously is an innovator because everything from Hotmail to the Tata Nano has originated from Indians or Indian expatriates. And these are recognized overseas as having Indian roots.

Either industry will drive the extension, or government, and that in turn will see a more powerful Indian nation brand in the 21st century. The author suggests that government needs to take the initiative now, encouraging the latent skills that Indian firms possess.

Incredible India is great from tourism’s point of view, and letting Matt Damon have part of his Bourne films in Goa was a master-stroke for publicity, but there is so much untapped potential for companies relying on a growing, positive, country-of-origin effect in India. The campaign needs to be expanded, and some of India’s top firms can even be used as champions to aid that expansion.

The future of the Indian brand: tackling immorality through humanism
The logical opposite to a global technocracy is the rise of humanism as a marketing strategy principle. This, in its most basic form, means putting people first. That individuals are stake-holders who should be treated with respect. That their needs are recognized and served. What the political shift in the world in 2008 demonstrated is a quickening of the quest for humanism, and the economic collapses illustrated the same. It is, indeed, being demanded by consumers, especially as they wise up to the lies being propagated by many businesses and governments. The winner in commerce in this century is the party that can deliver marketing in a humanistic fashion (23).

The marketing model, as it exists, which is top–down, paternalistic and dictatorial, is being turned on its head. While people are soul-searching, there must be some invalidation of the models that have gone before.

Individuals are being mobilized like never before, and not just in politics, but as economic players. No brand can survive today by being top–down: at best, brand owners are stewards who try to manage the perceptions of their brands held by audience members. The idea of brand stewardship over brand management is a trend that has been emerging since the 1970s (24), and India seems well poised to take advantage of it.

India has a culture that prides itself on service and that is already a sign that its companies are willing to be brand stewards.

When the author wrote a blog entry that was critical of the service at the Crowne Plaza Today Gurgaon hotel in 2008, staff from that hotel contacted him by telephone, wishing to find out what had gone wrong. Management from the property also called and wrote a formal apology to him (25). They understood that the brand needed to be defended and impressions about it needed to be managed and steered—that this was more important than any top–down, conventional marketing approach.

If Indian firms are willing to be more transparent, and India’s service industry has actually been a good training ground for that, then they can indeed put up a differentiated front to those in the west that have become too institutionalized and uncertain for their own good (26). Transparency over labour conditions, for example, might go a long way. Prices might have to rise but if coupled with a strong communications’ strategy, an Indian corporate brand could begin earning cachet.

This concept, too, can be incorporated into a wider idea of Incredible India. The service focus has worked for tourism, and there is no reason it cannot work for commerce—but with these humanist ideas in the background.

Growing through innovation, Indian brands and emphasizing the positive elements of the Indian national image is an admirable strategy to pursue.

The world is different this time
But why will this time be different, if 1987 gave us no changes, and even 9-11’s effects were so short-lived in the way people behaved?

This time will be different because the changes in the market-place have been happening over decades. In 1987, only finance was dented, but regular commerce was not. In 1997, the Asian economic crisis was perceived as mostly an Asian—indeed east Asian—affair. After 9-11, the main casualties were dot coms, which had already been disappearing as the bubble burst. These collapses have been mostly contained.

The pessimism that began with the lack of transparency in an American-led system—if not conspiracy—affects regular people in the US’s main street. It has not been contained. The way those falsely rated bonds have been traded, many times over, has exposed the risk to more people than ever before.

India’s quest will be to find an inherently humanistic marketing model that fills the vacuum. The next step after deciding on the points of differentiation in the nation brand is to symbolize and communicate these principles to all audiences, internal and external.

It is a promising future for India, thanks to the nation’s existing multiculturalism, its cosmopolitanism, and its willingness to create world-class products and experiences. Government needs to begin encouraging this through extending Incredible India, creating confidence among Indian organizations that they are, indeed, capable of taking on the world.

(1) W. Olins: Trading Identities: Why Countries and Companies Are Taking on Each Other’s Roles. London: The Foreign Policy Centre 1999.

(2) S. Anholt: Brand New Justice: the Upside of Global Branding. Oxford: Butterworth–Heinemann 2003.

(3) For more information, visit www.earthspeak.com.

(4) For the significance of this term, coined by Ian Ryder, see N. Ind: Living the Brand: How to Transform Every Member of Your Organization into a Brand Champion, 3rd ed. London: Kogan Page 2003.

(5) A. Wallace: ‘Get Me Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite’, Condé Nast Portfolio, February 2009, pp. 59–61.

(6) M. Lewis: Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street. New York: Penguin 1990.

(7) M. Lewis: ‘The End’, Condé Nast Portfolio, December 2008–January 2009, pp. 114–23, 154–9.

(8) See, e.g. N. N. Taleb: The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House 2007.

(9) C. M. Cannon: ‘Global Poll: How the World Sees the 2008 Election’, Reader’s Digest, .

(10) The technocracy, as this author uses the term, is not being used in its strict sense, which sounds like some sort of engineer’s dream society. It is used in the way author John Ralston Saul has: the sense that corporate controls have overwhelmed individual rights. J. R. Saul: The End of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World. New York: Overlook Press 2005.

(11) N. Klein: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador 2000.

(12) See .

(13) The author has been a regular contributor himself.

(14) The author believes India’s overseas web influence needs to grow vastly—the internet is a wonderful way to test audiences and to act as a herald for a physical market entry.

(15) Historically, this title is Warner Bros.’ first Hindi-language film.

(16) J. Yan: ‘Online Branding: an Antipodean Experience’, in Kim, Ling, Lee and Park (eds.): Human Society and the Internet. Berlin: Springer 2001, pp. 185–202.

(17) H. Assael: Marketing: Principles and Strategy. Hinsdale, Ill.: the Dryden Press 1990.

(18) Naturally, some things must take a western approach if one is to attain western customers. The way something is presented should look familiar to a first- or second-world customer.

(19) The caste system does not rest well with the west, either. The occident sees itself as progressive even if western organizations themselves depend on more of a hidden caste system, one which has kept real wages so low that a single breadwinner can no longer support a family; q.v. J. R. Saul, op. cit.

(20) New Zealand, by comparison, has entered a retrograde movement. Once leading the world with natural gas-powered taxis, police cars and other vehicles, the country’s petrol companies cancelled retail CNG for automobiles in 1996, harming its environment.

(21) A reassertion of Keynesian economics—that have worked better than the monetarism of the west? See J. R. Saul, op. cit.

(22) Aside from Tata, other global Indian firms have come to the fore over the years, but fewer than expected. Infosys is by no means perfect but it has been inspirational enough to have won a Brands with a Conscience Award from the Medinge Group in 2003.

(23) See, e.g. N. Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands. London: Kogan Page 2003.

(24) It could be argued that the relationship marketing concept is related to these principles; q.v. S. Engeseth: One: a Consumer Revolution in Business. London: Cyan–Marshall Cavendish 2005.

(25) J. Yan: ‘After a Negative Experience, Crowne Plaza Today Gurgaon Impresses’, Lucire, January 6, 2009, .

(26) An example is one of the author’s own ventures, Lucire, a fashion magazine published in print and on the internet in various countries. What is encouraged is for team members to live the brand: to be ambassadors for Lucire and to exhibit decent behaviours. Contrasting a great deal of the arrogance of the fashion industry has been its humility. Arrogance gets one only so far, but humility and openness earn allies for the long term. Arrogance has led to the downfall of many a western firm, as the finance and automotive sectors are discovering right now in the US.

Ragbag

Ekomarine

One Water

Chhatra Sagar

Jack Yan
Jack Yan & Associates, PO Box 14-368, Wellington 6241, New Zealand
jack.yan@jyanet.com

Executive summary
Detroit has not ever used a brand orientation in its automakers’ marketing strategies, and it talks of trimming brands and numbers to allow it to compete. The author believes in being more focused on brands and not losing economies of scale, and building more of what consumers want. The tools are there, such as consumer-targeted blogs, but manufacturers need to use them.

Introduction
Motown has been in trouble constantly since the 1970s. That time, it was its failure to see how the imports were gradually conquering North American market, and when the Arab-Israeli War forced up fuel prices in 1973, the Japanese were already there with models that had great gas mileage. When the second oil shock happened, US companies were still largely ill equipped. Then-Ford president Lee Iacocca noted that sales of its full-size cars were going up, leaving Detroit’s number two without many economy models.¹ The Japanese won again.

Similar patterns began emerging in the 1990s. Then, Detroit was obsessed with trucks and SUVs. It is generally regarded that there is some financial wisdom behind building these large vehicles, as they generate plenty of profit in an industry where US automakers have massive costs, especially relating to union workers’ pensions and healthcare. But it was becoming obvious to only a few that Detroit was leaving its economy models behind, while the Japanese, once again, were sweeping in with up-to-the-minute variants of their Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic.

The author wrote of this folly at the turn of the century, including DaimlerChrysler’s decision to abandon the low-cost Plymouth marque²—in case low-cost, cheap cars became necessary again. In both these cases, the latest (2008) fuel crisis, driven by high prices and speculation, have proven him right. Detroit is scrambling once again, as it did in the 1970s and early 1980s, wondering how to fix itself. And its ideas smack of repetition—since some of them have been proven to have failed the industry before, in other nations.

The problems are long-term ones that cannot be fixed by short-term adjustments. The truck and SUV obsession was a short-term fix, a quest for profits which Chrysler Corp., in particular, rode very well with its Dodge and Jeep lines in the 1990s. But it left Chrysler weak in passenger cars.³ It is to be expected, however, since Wall Street itself has an obsession: that of the quarterly result. This, however, does not bode well for corporations that have to last generations.

Japan seems to lack this problem as investors are perfectly happy for their companies to see out a longer term. While there are exceptions, Toyota has been mostly left to its own devices, its management opting for a gradual evolution of its strategies, cutting costs of manufacture and appointing westerners to the board. It builds, for instance, the Camry and Corolla in more locations than any one US model.

It would be foolhardy to say that Toyota is impregnable. It has weaknesses, in that its cars are considered the equivalent of domestic appliances: reliable but uninspiring. Detroit had attempted such cars before, often with Japanese input. And it found that these models were not true to the various brands owned by Chrysler, Ford and General Motors.

The brand orientation, which necessitates long-term thinking, is what Detroit needs.

This is a bold statement as GM-watchers may be able to point to a failed era where the company did just that. Buick, Cadillac and other GM divisions were, the company claims, run as brands. But this is not true, at least not branding as most professionals understand it. GM made the classic mistake of equating sales to branding: all it did was to regroup into a geographical sales structure and expected its regional heads to maximize sales.⁴ Little consideration was given to the meaning behind each brand, nor was there feedback from consumers. The experiment was deemed a failure.

Others may also point to the failure Ford has had with its brands, even if it has been credited with being a good brand steward of properties such as Volvo and Aston Martin, two which it had acquired in the 1990s. Jaguar, it is pointed out, was always a division that kept needing investment, never making anything for Ford, despite it paying US$2·5 billion. But there, too, Ford misunderstood the Jaguar brand, lumbering it with passé designs that the marque’s customers did not want. While it never wound up merely badge-engineering Ford cars, it cannot be easily argued that Ford’s failures were due to brand management.

The talk around Detroit is of rationalization and killing off brands, getting its costs and sales more into line. GM, it is argued, may have to be content with being a global number-two, and Toyota can remain in its top spot. Retrenchment seems to be the theme.

It’s true that the Big Three need to leave or at least reconsider sectors where they have not created products that the customer wanted. But are they listening? There are enough tools out there on the blogosphere to show that, for example, Ford buyers would prefer the latest European Focus rather than the model it is currently selling. But only GM has made any headway in blogging and listening directly to consumers’ feedback. Ford is blinded by the fact its old-tech Focus is selling well, without realizing that the same behaviour turned the original Ford Taurus from class leader to a has-been model line in less than a generation.

Most of the techniques have existed for decades. Retrenchment and rationalization were pursued by British Leyland in the 1970s on. The company now exists, other than the Jaguar and Land Rover businesses, as an independent company making one MG model, as a division of Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. Jaguar and Land Rover are owned by India’s Tata Motors.

Toyota, the darling of the motoring press, particularly for its hybrids, does not pursue retrenchment. It is easily argued that it does not have to. But it has been clever in filling niches and using a minimal number of platforms to create a wide variety of cars—something Detroit’s Big Three were once credited with doing and needs to again. Right now, it’s looking at ways to cement the lead, especially in a cost-cutting programme—in the belief that it’s better to do this calmly than being forced to.⁵

This paper deals first with some of the ideas being bandied about the US auto industry for starters, then groups them into techniques that could save the Big Three.

Troubling thoughts in Detroit
Ingrassia⁶ points out that the Big Three have shed 269,440 employees since 2000 and lost a combined $67 billion in the last three years—and that’s not even counting Chrysler for all 12 months of 2007. But at the same time he points out that Fiat turned itself around and posted record profits. Nissan went from lossmaker to profitable in 2001. Chrysler itself was turned around by Iacocca in the 1980s.

The industry, he says, has at least made moves on the union front, which is one of its biggest hurdles.

But some of the ideas that he has found executives mentioning in Motown show the usual maximize-profits-now mentality that landed the automakers into trouble in the first place.

GM
GM has eight brands, and it is believed, some need to go. In fact, GM has more than eight, once one starts counting Opel, Vauxhall and Holden in its overseas arms. Ingrassia reports very geocentric thinking from Detroit: ‘If you’re shopping for a midpriced sedan, for example, G.M. has six. Buick by itself has two. Toyota, by comparison, has just one—the Camry, which sells nearly as many vehicles each year as all six of G.M.’s offerings combined.’⁷

It’s not totally true. Even in the US, Toyota has a Lexus sedan costing what a well equipped Camry would cost. In its home market, Toyota ?elds more than six mid-priced sedans, selling to a smaller total population. While this is a straw-man argument—foreign automakers have a small share in Japan and Toyota nears 50 per cent⁸—the quantity of entrants in any sector is generally not a problem.

The important thing is that each brand is well defined enough without cannibalization. Ingrassia indicates that GM CEO Rick Wagoner is trying to consolidate sales’ channels without trimming the brand line-up. This makes total sense, because there is nothing that suggests that one manager could not oversee two or three brands. The Japanese have generally kept trim structures for its brands. Toyota itself manages three. Having one divisional head oversee two or three brands can work if there are no favourites and each brand’s positioning is well defined and understood.

The short-term thinking is that Saab, Buick, Pontiac, Hummer and Saturn should die. This is the same thinking at DaimlerChrysler that led to Plymouth’s demise. But it is not the same thinking that led to Oldsmobile’s, a GM division, at the turn of the century.

Oldsmobile became an untenable brand for GM because it occupied a very similar market niche—price-wise and psychographically—as Buick. Purists will be able to nit-pick that argument as there were differences between the buyers: Oldsmobile ones sought American quality and tradition, while Buick ones sought presence without arrogance. However, the reality inside GM was that Oldsmobiles were not really given a distinctive character and given that one of branding’s core tenets is differentiation, the brand had failed.⁹

Plymouth, however, was on its way to becoming a distinctive brand with its own design language. Chrysler had already débuted the Plymouth Prowler, a hot rod acting as a halo car for the brand. The next model, the PT Cruiser, was about to be launched, débuting a retro design. The remaining Plymouths, developed as Dodges with different trim, were given scripted badging that hinted at the brand’s more youthful, lively positioning for the 21st century.

A Plymouth division, had it not been for its cancellation under DaimlerChrysler, would have expressed American youthfulness—the PT Cruiser’s initial success illustrated as much—while Chrysler itself would have remained premium, and Dodge sporty.

Instead, Plymouth products were rolled into the Chrysler marque, confusing that brand—diluting it and forcing a repositioning into a sort of American Volkswagen. At least then it posed no greater threat to some of Mercedes-Benz’s lesser models. But Chrysler lost a distinctive brand with value-leading models—which would have helped it today in an age of high fuel prices. Plymouth had stayed away from SUVs and trucks—a great brand image for 2008.

The brand-trimming argument is what caused BL to kill Triumph’s saloons and MG’s sports cars a generation ago. The thinking was that Triumph and Rover saloons competed in the same sector—based on price, they did.¹⁰ Based on brand, they didn’t. There was similar thinking that led to the closure of MG—because Triumph, it was decided, already had a corporate sports car.

The consequence that played out over decades was that BL’s successors lost their economies of scale.

BL was starved of investment, however, which meant it could not have realistically fielded two identical cars with different badges for long. But it had already made steps to group Austin and Morris together, then Jaguar, Rover and Triumph. One divisional head could have overseen well defined brands, putting a sporting version of one saloon into Triumph’s range, and a traditional one into Rover’s. Experts generally agree today, with hindsight, that the failure to understand the distinctive brand attitudes and brand loyalty behind each BL brand caused credible models to be axed.

Even Toyota has been careful in Japan. It fields, for instance, mid-sized front-wheel-drive sedans such as the Camry and rear-wheel-drive models such as the Mark X. They look fairly similar. But it understands that they appeal to different buyers in a market where consumers are likely to be loyal to model lines in the way US buyers are loyal to brands. If this holds true, then Chevrolet, Saturn and Pontiac can coexist, for example.

There is no need to ape Toyota just because it fields just three brands in the US. No US automaker can afford to rationalize its range to that extent, because none has been able to show that a single American brand can sell twice the volume of two defunct brands. A Chevrolet Cobalt might not be able to fill its own shoes as well as that of a Pontiac G5’s, if Pontiac were to be axed. It’s just as likely that those Pontiac buyers would go to the imports. Historically, did Oldsmobile and Plymouth buyers remain with GM and Chrysler after their parent firms killed them?

Brand axeing should take place in cases of overlap or ill de?nition—and a recent example in Japan would be that of Mazda, which bid farewell to many of the marques it tried to create in the early 1990s (such as E?ni and Eunos).

Saab is a distinctive brand that has been starved of new models for years, but it certainly isn’t in as bad a shape as any of Mazda’s old marques. It has two sedans on Opel Vectra platforms, by themselves not that successful. An SUV was put into the range to stop buyers from leaving the marque. Saab’s problems are not down to a brand that has a strong aircraft heritage, the warmth of Swedish culture and a history of innovation—messages that are still continued in its marketing. Saab’s problems are due to the dearth of new models, which means that it fails as a BMW or Mercedes-Benz rival.

It has no ready overlap in the GM universe, and all the brand really needs are new models. GM has made some headway in putting Saab development with its German company Adam Opel. What it needs Stateside is to look at Saab alongside a non-competing GM brand—and any are compatible. In Australasia, Saab is sold alongside HSV and Hummer, two other premium GM brands.

Modern communications could see a very effective platform engineering programme, which GM is already putting in place anyway. This means one team is working on the Opel Corsa E and Daewoo Gentra replacements, which will be sold in the US as the Chevrolet Aveo successor next decade. GM Europe is working on mid-sized cars such as the Opel Insignia and the next Chevrolet Malibu. And GM’s Australian arm, Holden, created the full-size platform underpinning the Holden Commodore and Chevrolet Camaro.

This programme simply needs to be extended further to creating niche vehicles for Saab as well as replacements for its current range—and there is evidence that GM already got that memo. Buick should benefit from this, too: a Lucerne replacement could easily have been developed alongside the Commodore.

Similar arguments could be made in support of Buick’s presence. While that brand has trimmed models in recent years, what it does field is distinctively styled and its brand, too, is well defined. Sheetmetal might cost money, but the majority of R&D goes into automotive architecture—stuff that customers cannot see. Buick and Hummer appeal to very distinctive buyers who are not catered for elsewhere, and Hummer itself is leading the charge into international markets.

That leaves Pontiac and Saturn, which is already benefiting from globalization. Pontiac fields two rebadged Holdens: a large sedan and a truck. Saturn is becoming the American name for Opel: it can easily go from import-fighter to import-seller, provided it keeps its no-nonsense approach to retail, one of its main differentiating factors.

GM has used the rebadging idea well in some markets. In Britain, most Vauxhalls are really Opels—in most of the range, the model names are even the same. For years, Holden used the same method, though now it rebadges several Daewoo models (Daewoo is another GM brand). There is no reason for Pontiac not to have some Holdens, with the rest of the range selling extreme-performance models made in the US. It would increase economies for Holden. Saturnized Opels would also help Opel in Europe reach greater economies there.

If there is one thing that history has taught us is that tastes are cyclical. Muscle cars may be wrong for 2008 but they may be right for 2012. If Pontiac is killed off, can GM successfully deal with that sector then?

The above are cursory brand analyses only. No one should say that that Saturn’s only differentiator is a no-nonsense retail approach. There are plenty of other reasons that Saturn is distinct from Chevrolet or the other automakers’ brands. And those other reasons, especially considering the buyer, probably won’t overlap as greatly as a mere financial, BL-style analysis would suggest.

In fact, Aaker’s ?ve brand equity targets¹¹ are instructive and it is not impossible to maximize all of them, propelling every GM brand to varying degrees of success. GM and its investors need to remember history and why Britain still has a car industry, just one dominated by Japanese and foreign makes.

GM needs to begin by defining its brands and engaging consumer help to get there. It has a good enough support base via its blog, Fast Lane, to which Bob Lutz, its product czar, contributes. People believe their ideas are being heard and Lutz has been making many of the right moves by enlisting the help of global GM divisions. That can only be enriching to brand equity.

One brand that has escaped criticism for the most part is Cadillac, which has at least sorted its design language and styling out, produced products that Americans (especially style-conscious younger consumers) want,¹² so either GM got lucky—or GM has the skill set already within its company.

GM’s other great asset, which it is finally using now with Lutz’s top-down endorsement (another necessity in branding), is its global divisions.¹³ Each has been made a centre of excellence. Each is part of a greater global structure, entrenched in GM behaviour over decades. Toyota centralizes a lot more of its product development, but GM may be able to have each centre work in tandem and bring products to market more quickly.

Ford
Ingrassia is more optimistic about Ford, which has been slimming down, selling Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover. But he is critical of the company’s product range, and rightly so.

At the time of writing, Ford has been enjoying healthy sales in the US with its Focus compact car. However, car enthusiasts have been critical of this model, since it uses an old platform. Even México has the new-platform model in its range, leading some to disbelieve Ford’s reason that the newer model would be priced too highly to be competitive in the US. (Ford also sells the Mazda 3 in the US at a competitive price, and that is on the newer platform.) Alongside the Honda Civic, the Focus seems old hat.

However, expensive fuel and Ford’s widespread US dealer network have meant that the Focus is being snapped up. Some of this is probably due to brand loyalty, too: those that stuck by the company in the days of the truck and the Explorer SUV are looking at the Focus as a simple, bugs-ironed-out model.

As mentioned earlier, strong sales are not always an indicator of long-term brand strength. Should fuel prices come down and people begin repeating their less considerate, energy-consuming behaviours, will they turn to Ford? Many Taurus buyers did not return to the company when they wanted another mid-sized sedan: they went to Toyota and Honda. There are only so many years that a company can sell an old-platform design, and in the age of the internet, car buyers are more savvy than ever.

Ford has a bright spot, says Ingrassia: its CD338 line of sedans (Ford Fusion, Mercury Milan and Lincoln MKZ). He is right, as these have also managed to be sold in South America as well, as premium models. Using an old (but revised and competitive) Mazda Atenza platform, CD338 was developed with good savings, showing that single platforms can be adapted further. The current Taurus, using a Volvo platform, is another example.

But Ford could trim its platforms further and make use of its international divisions. The Ford Mondeo’s European development duplicated that of CD338, and enthusiasts have been supportive of the European car. Ford is ending the duplication with its next B-sector (supermini) car, the Fiesta, which will be sold in Europe, North America, Asia and Oceania.

Ford’s problems in the past were linked to internal politicking, leading many to dismiss the global model. They cite the CDW27 project of the early 1990s to be an example of a car developed in Europe and failing in the US. Its size was often blamed. The reality was that CDW27 was under-marketed, especially as BMW continued to earn sales in the same size segment.

Facing troubles, and with a new leader in the form of CEO Alan Mulally, Ford may well have realized that being a united company has its benefits.

It could do more, as Australian commentators are quick to point out that their countrymen’s big-car expertise is not used sufficiently. But it does make use of Volvo as a safety centre of excellence, and there are signs of change.

From a branding point of view, Ford may well have sorted things with its core brand, steadily sorting its product range out in what appears to be a medium-term plan leading into the mid-2010s.

It has generally been regarded as a good brand steward for Volvo and Land Rover. Jaguar’s problems were detailed earlier and they seem to have been an (expensive) exception rather than the rule. Aston Martin grew under Ford as well.¹⁴

Volvo has been engineering class-leading platforms for the company, it has a well defined brand centring around safety and Swedish design, and it’s a rare case where the (profitable) status quo should be observed. Mazda is Ford’s sporting brand, and seems to trade well on its Japanese origins and philosophy, with halo cars such as the MX-5 and RX-8.

Its problems rest with Lincoln and Mercury. Lincoln was once a proud brand, but with the demise of the Town Car, no longer fields a large luxury model to rival the large Lexus LS and the top Cadillac. Instead, its models are warmed-over Fords, making sense from a cost perspective. Lincoln buyers are indeed different, brand-wise, from Ford ones. But surely they are discerning enough to notice that what they drive does not look that special?

The good news for Lincoln is that it has downsized, something that it failed to do in the 1970s until GM had already made its move. However, Ford is falling into a trap with cars that do not support the Lincoln brand well, and it can hurt the company in the long run. A brand vision was once developed and show cars built (such as one called the Mark IX), demonstrating a renaissance and a design language for the brand. Little seems to have come of it other than adopting the grille design. It shows short-term thinking and Lincoln is being hurt until it can launch more interesting cars. It seriously needs a brand strategy outlined.

If Lincolns are not special, then what of Mercury—which has languished for over a generation? The brand is nearly invisible, it sells cars that are considered upscale Fords, and the company’s financial problems meant that any distinctive models (such as the Cougar) were cancelled.

Mercury could be fixed if Ford simply examines its Japanese affiliate’s range at Mazda, which develops more models than US consumers see. If the brand were defined as a quality import-fighter, it could have a chance at distancing itself from its warmed-over-Ford image. An obvious candidate for “Mercurization” would be the next Mazda MPV.

Chrysler
Chrysler, the smallest player, is now under a private equity firm’s control and is not particularly well positioned. Once a highly respected company in the 1990s, Chrysler had lean R&D processes, exciting niche models and the admiration of American businesses. Forbes called it the Company of the Year.

This was appealing to Daimler-Benz AG of Stuttgart, which took over Chrysler in the late 1990s. As discussed, the Plymouth marque was a casualty. But the takeover was poor in other areas: there were cultural clashes, the brands were never defined to begin with, and the newly merged DaimlerChrysler found dif?culty getting economies of scale with the platforms. Lean R&D suddenly seemed more cumbersome. And the resignations of many of Chrysler’s old bosses—Bob Eaton, Bob Lutz, François Castaing, inter alia—did not do much for the workforce.¹⁵

Dodge was an easy brand to define, alongside Americanness and sportiness. However, Chrysler went from innovative American luxury—its LH big cars were highly acclaimed, as were their successors—to a sort of Volkswagen, having low-priced models such as the Neon and PT Cruiser sitting uncomfortably with the 300 large car.

Brand-wise, Chrysler is all over the place. Ingrassi is right that the company has not fielded a true luxury car for years. It is cooperating with Chery of China on a small car—which might be too little, too late, when it is launched.¹⁶ And when it is launched, where will it go? It would have been ideal for Plymouth.

Meanwhile, Nissan is building a subcompact for Chrysler in South America. Chrysler is building a minivan for Volkswagen at a Canadian plant.

One scenario is to kill Chrysler off, which would dilute Dodge’s brand—since models such as the Chery joint-venture vehicle will have to be absorbed. It would fit as poorly there in buyers’ minds as the PT Cruiser did with the old LHS and 300M large cars. Dodge, after all, has just released a sports car, the Challenger, a retro-design exercise meant to recall an age when its brand was well defined and proud. The Chery JV model could well look sporty—but if it is an economy model, will Chrysler be tempted to put another marque on it?

Having fewer brands will do Chrysler no favours with its future models. Any disease the parent brand has will simply be passed on. Its saving grace is Jeep, which has not been tarnished greatly; in fact, Chrysler has been quite good at managing that brand and, for the most part, delivering the right product.¹⁷

While it might make some sense to streamline further, buyers make their decisions about a brand quickly. Brands are shortcuts so consumers can grasp their message quickly, hence the need for recognizable brand “attitudes”.¹⁸ And Dodge and Jeep have distinct characters that shouldn’t be tampered with for fear of turning consumers away from that easy recognition and brand equity. Chrysler can be redefined as a quality marque, one with a dose of snob appeal but everyday prices—if it can really deliver that quality. Taking the halo effect of the 300, its most recognizable model, and bringing it on to smaller models isn’t a bad idea—but it remains to be practised.

It will never be a Cadillac rival in the foreseeable future, unless some of those rapid R&D and tight inter-business relationships can return to make it a lean niche-filler. Those glory days weren’t that long ago.

The solutions
First, each of Detroit’s Big Three has some homework to do, in understanding their brands’ visions, what they mean, and what they can mean. They can involve the public via the blogosphere, in a country that has high internet penetration. This will show transparency and a willingness to engage with the American car buyer, whom each company needs to win back. Or, they can do the exercise internally with cross-functional groups, but properly¹⁹—there is no more room for a lip-service nod to branding as there was in the 1990s.

Secondly, the Big Three need to understand just what makes their cars appealing. Aaker’s brand equity elements are a good start but the quest for them needs to be constant.²⁰ The Japanese may have used W. Edwards Deming’s principles over decades to get their quality up. American companies need to leap-frog that by being more engaging, being open where Japanese companies act closed. Continued understanding of consumer tastes via the blogosphere is one method; using that to inform future tastes is another. Feedback is important, and it has only recently played a part in the marcom end of the Big Three. Prior to that it only had customer clinics.

Thirdly, there is an untapped generation, namely the young people who are either too young to drive or getting into their first cars now. What has informed their choices? The author is willing to bet that while there are some who love muscle cars, there may be many more impressed by models that conserve energy.

Fourthly, US automakers are among the heaviest R&D investors—and they need to bring more innovation to the market more rapidly.

Fifthly, they need to realize the effect of a loss of economies of scale. The historical models are there. The key is to build the cars consumers want²¹—something that GM and Ford actually do quite well in Europe. If Levitt is right and there is a homogenization of tastes²²—BMW and Porsche operate on this notion, and Toyota does in the mid-sized and subcompact sectors—then foreign bases need to be used more effectively. It’s not about shutting factories and firing personnel, but being more sincere about delivering for future consumers.

Summary
Killing brands, as any observer of British Leyland has demonstrated, is not a solution when those brands are well defined, contribute to economies and have brand loyalty, recognition and perceived quality. Even if a brand contributes to economies alone, it can be saved through repositioning.

The US automakers need to put in play longer-term thinking. Chrysler is most dire at the moment, and Ford, while leaner, could do more with Lincoln and Mercury. Ford itself has excellent product and needs to show it can overcome regional politics. In neither case should they feel forced in delivering short-term results. In Chrysler’s case it may be able to demonstrate to its owners that it can do well without the pressure of share prices.

General Motors has all the necessary ingredients for survival. It has shown a willingness to engage consumers, find ways of making use of its foreign operations and look at ways of retaining brands and economies of scale.

Being true to their brands can help US automakers get back to a strong position. Setting one’s sights lower and claiming easy victories was certainly not the way Toyota rose to number one. Honda climbed from obscurity to Japan’s number two—and it has one of the US’s top-selling models—by setting higher goals. British Leyland should be a constant reminder of what not to do—unless the Big Three want to wind up being subsidiaries of foreign firms, their marques mere reminders of better times.

Notes
1. L. Iacocca and W. Novak: Iacocca: an Autobiography. New York: Bantam Books 1984.

2. J. Yan: ‘Where Is DaimlerChrysler Heading?’, CAP Online, February 12, 2000, <http://www.jyanet.com/cap/2000/0212ob0.shtml>.

3. J. Flint: ‘Company of the Year: Chrysler’, Forbes, January 13, 1997, pp. 83 ff.; q.v. E. A. Robinson: ‘America’s Most Admired Companies’, Fortune, March 3, 1997, p. F-2.

4. M. Kerbs: ‘G.M. Will Pare as Many as 1,000 White-Collar Jobs’, The New York Times, August 5, 1998.

5. P. O’Connell (ed.): ‘The Man Driving Toyota’, Business Week, July 22, 2005 (also online at <http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jul2005/nf20050721_7169_db053.htm>).

6. P. Ingrassia: ‘Who Will Survive?’, Condé Nast Portfolio, June 2008, pp. 86–95.

7. Ibid., at p. 93.

8. I. Rowley: ‘Toyota Set to Top 50% Market Share in Japan’, Business Week, ‘The Auto Beat’, November 1, 2007, <http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2007/11/toyota_tops_50.html>.

9. See, e.g., E. Shapiro: ‘Is Oldsmobile Name a Marketing Lemon?’, The New York Times, October 29, 1992.

10. The Triumph brand is owned by BMW, which understands that from a branding perspective, it poses a threat to its core range.

11. D. A. Aaker: Managing Brand Equity. New York: Free Press 1991.

12. J. Yan: ‘The Brand Attitudes of Automobiles’, New Age Branding: Concepts and Cases, vol. 1. Hyderabad: ICFAI Press 2002, pp. 101–13, at pp. 105–6.

13. Remaining divisions such as Cadillac simply need to get the product right: the author understands that its much-lauded CTS sedan, for example, still falls well behind its German rivals on the interior. Meanwhile, Opel does acceptable interiors. This is a single example of GM’s unused assets.

14. J. Yan: ‘The Brand Attitudes of Automobiles’, op. cit., at pp. 111–12.

15. Ibid., at p. 111.

16. Not every company has been successful in cooperating with Red Chinese companies. Chrysler has had some experience with its Beijing Jeep venture, among others, but not with Chery.

17. Some cannibalization has been risked with models such as the Jeep Commander, and its low-end passenger-car spin-offs have questionable appeal for the brand long-term.

18. See, e.g. J. Yan: ‘The Brand Attitudes’, op. cit., and W. Olins as quoted in J. Yan: ‘The Attitude of Identity’, Desktop, October 2000, pp. 26–31.

19. See, e.g. J. Yan: ‘The Brand Attitudes’, ibid.

20. Toyota’s success factors are discussed in ibid., at pp. 108–9.

21. See, e.g. G. Green: ‘Meet the Inspirational, Indefatigable Geoff Polites’, Car, June 2008, pp. 130–3, at p. 132.

22. T. Levitt: ‘The Globalization of Markets’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 61, no. 3, May-June 1992, pp. 92–102; cf. M. Griffin: ‘From Cultural Imperialism to Transnational Commercialization: Shifting Paradigms in International Media Studies’, Global Media Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, fall 2002, <http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/fa02/gmj-fa02-grif?n.htm>.

This paper has also appeared in CAP Online.

Jack Yan
CEO, Jack Yan & Associates, PO Box 14-368, Wellington 6241, New Zealand
jack.yan@jyanet.com

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Executive summary
Successful brands on the internet depend on certain ingredients. And unlike offline brands, the process surrounding vision, research, exposition and image differ slightly, even if the ingredients of brand equity remain the same. Importantly, a loose vision, informal research, and tapping into consumer advocacy all help build a strong brand on the internet. All these additionally contribute to whether a brand has acquired secondary meaning in a legal sense, although the existing test needs to be reconsidered.

1. Introduction
Despite some major texts on branding in the last 10 years, from Wally Olins’s The New Guide to Identity,² to Nicholas Ind’s Living the Brand,³ and the Ind-edited Beyond Branding,⁴ branding is a very divisive field. Few have done studies to connect the organization’s vision to business performance, which this author did in 1999, and the majority of companies have still failed to appoint marketers to the boardroom. Meanwhile, others are leading the cutting edge of branding, such as Stefan Engeseth with his new work, One.⁵ There is little bridging research into the integrated marketing communications’ model and the cutting-edge, consumer movement papers; and certainly very little on how brands can be built using the internet.⁶
Before delving into this paper, it is useful to cover what branding is. As outlined in one of the author’s earlier papers,⁷ it may be thought of as:

the methods in which the organization communicates, symbolizes and differentiates itself to all of its audiences.

The word branding has altered in meaning, even amongst the experts such as Olins.⁸ Traditionally, the ‘brand’ was part of ‘identity’, which may be defined as:⁹

the explicit management of all the ways in which the organization presents itself through experiences and perceptions to all of its audiences.

The brand was merely the part of this management that was directed at a consumer, or an audience member, external to the organization.

However, perhaps through media coverage and Naomi Klein’s seminal No Logo,¹⁰ which questioned the ethics behind branding, the word brand entered the vernacular. At the same time, the branding model evolved somewhat: Olins began touting the brand as an ‘attitude’ that described the organization,¹¹ and branding consultants became a little more obsessed with the message being sent to consumers, perhaps in the wake of No Logo. It, therefore, became important to make sure that the vision of the organization took into account the message it would send to consumers as one of its earliest steps, and to make sure what was being communicated inside the organization was identical to what was being communicated outside. The word brand began taking on the meaning once given to identity.

This coincided with another development: the “mainstreaming” of the online world. With consumer input now being sought readily for things such as product development (e.g. online surveys became common and were thought of as a means through which the most current data about the market-place could be sought), and consumers themselves becoming powerfula dvocates for brands (spreading good news via emails, or indeed, bad news), there was less of a distinction between the marketing departments of organizations and the customers themselves.

Therefore, the branding model began looking quite different. Once, organizations could depend on training their staff to tow the official line, expressing the brand in the way dictated by head office. But consumers could not be managed in the same way. They needed to be incorporated into brand-communication decisions, either by (a) inspiring staff members and getting them to work so closely to consumers on the hope of “infectious enthusiasm”, or (b) turning those consumers themselves into a de facto marketing department.¹²

There are good examples of each. The former group is typified by companies in Ind’s Living the Brand,¹³ notably Patagonia. The sportswear company has staff that use its products, while consumers are prepared to talk up its goods. The latter group includes many of the networking services on the web, including LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). Arguably, the initial growth of Yahoo! (first built while its founders were still at Stanford University), Google (which uses its user base to spread news of its new products), and Flickr (which is being found by web users frequenting blogs and similar services) could be credited to the second method. The author refrains from using the viral marketing term here, largely because it has become hackneyed.

But how does this online growth actually happen and how does it contribute to the strength of a brand? And if this happens, can the internet truly impact on brand equity¹⁴ and related issues, such as providing a brand with secondary meaning¹⁵ in the eyes of the law?

2. The branding process
The logical place to begin is in the regular branding model.¹⁶ The brand begins with a vision, or, indeed, a slogan (if it is far-reaching enough to guide the whole organization). The important things are that the vision is unique and able to summarize the organizational “attitude”. Audiences learn of the vision through such things as the logo and the communications that surround it. These should ideally express the brand’s attitude. They form an association between the symbols such as the logo and the values of the organization.

As stated in an earlier paper, ‘Semiotics are key’:¹⁷

Symbols, logos, etc., signify certain things that form mental pictures in our mind when we interpret them. [A branding] campaign ensures that the correct pictures are formed and that incorrect or earlier ones are replaced.¹⁸ Repeated exposures reinforce meaning, which is why consistency in branding is important.

This leads to brand equity, which is the added value that a brand endows a particular product or service. The author wrote of its consequence:¹⁹ ‘As audiences—whether they are shareholders, future customers, students or any other group—select or think of the brand more frequently, they ultimately contribute to the organization’s business performance in economic or strategic terms.’

Online, the psychological process remains largely the same. In 2001, when the author last explored online brands,²⁰ there were more audience members specifically seeking certain companies’ products and services on the web. Other than online advertising, many web-based brands were not discovered unwittingly, unlike many that appeared on television or in print. However, there was an indication that this was changing as the web became more commonplace.

2.1 Online brands today
It is almost difficult to remember how western business was conducted without the internet and the World Wide Web. The web is often the first destination for any researcher today, for instance.

But there is still no follow-up from the author’s earlier work on how some online brands capture the public’s consciousness and others do not. Most people discovered Google, for instance, through referrals. (At the time of the earlier paper, Google was still unknown, although the firm existed.) Blogger.com, the service that enables web users to maintain public online journals (web logs, or blogs), spread through its logo appearing on the blogs it hosted on the internet—and gained a secondary meaning as a result. Yet other brands remain online, and have done so for years, without influencing the public.

It may be easy to say that Amazon.com, for example, was so revolutionary that by being first-in-sector, it gained mainstream media coverage. That may be so, but there are other ventures that were firsts in their sector that never received that coverage—Fashionbrat, for example, was New Zealand’s first online fashion magazine, but has become forgotten beyond this author’s own coverage. Even some of the first fashion magazines on the internet in Australia (Marie Claire, Fashion Australia) and the United States (Fashion Internet) never captured huge public attention and do not survive today. Something else must be at work.

The author’s earlier work²¹ illustrated that there were some strategic and structural differences between successful online firms and successful offline ones.
Vision. Visions were more fluid, so ventures that were defined too tightly failed: Pets.com and Boo.com, which admittedly had other issues, were defined narrowly and could not shift into new businesses when their original failures became apparent. At the time, the author cited one of his own properties, Lucire, which has survived as a web site and online magazine; while the other two businesses cited have changed only because of changes in their founders’ personal lives. Up to the times of their changes, they had survived well, based on a “loose” vision. By equal measure, Amazon.com survived by branching out from books to DVDs, toys and even lawn furniture.

One issue that was apparent in 2001 was the need to have corporate citizenship. This shift toward more socially responsible firms has become stronger in the last few years, with greater awareness of “anti-brands”.²² Internet audiences tended to be more alert to these anti-brands, some preferring products from entrepreneurial, independent firms.
Research. The earlier research also illustrated that there was a lower-cost and shallower research process, with online entrepreneurs willing to begin their ventures on instinct and relationships with other organizations and customers. Successful online firms were willing to employ modern communication techniques.
Exposition. In communicating the brand, the organization partners with others to help it get its word out. Independent contractors, freelancers and other web sites (through links, and, today, mentions on blogs) become “advocates” for the organization. Those that began offline tended to retain the same brand. (Exceptions exist, such as Condé Nast’s Style.com, the online version of Vogue, though that can still be reached in the United States via Vogue.com.) They also tended to be global in their approach, quoting, for example, US dollar prices, despite their location, and made little use of their own country’s symbols. They also attempted to use as much offline media as possible.

To reach the public, they relied more on below-the-line marketing, and not above-the-line. Part of the reason is budgetary, but they also managed to put out distinctive products or services. The successful firms examined tended to have a more personal and positive “attitude”. They made use of a cynicism against big business to their own advantage.
Image. No changes to how brand image—the consequence of branding—were found between offline and online firms. In other words, all the “hard work” is done earlier, with the results of a strong brand—image, business performance and secondary meaning—unaffected by the medium.

Two brands today may be instructive, as their growth is happening at the time of writing and are considered successes by the media. One is Flickr.com, a photograph-sharing service recently acquired by Yahoo!.Its growth has been gradual, but it shows that a company that did not have a huge marketing budget can become an integral part of the web. (At the time of writing, Flickr has 158,000,000 hits on Google, while a search for “US Supreme Court” results in 37,400,000 hits.) If it follows the pattern of Yahoo!, Google et al, which it is expected to,²³ it will become a normal way for people to share digital photography.

A second brand, which is more fleeting, is the name of a movie. New Line’s Snakes on a Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson, began pre-production in 2005. The name was mentioned on a blog in August 2005, and its star insisted that the film be called that, after the studio attempted to change it to a more generic Pacific Air 121. Because of its odd name, it began circulating around the web, mostly with bloggers. By the end of the year, Wired had published an article about it in its print edition,²⁴ and unauthorized cups, T-shirts and even a blog (Snakes on a Blog) had been created. Some even went so far as to say that snakes on a plane had become a common phrase akin to ‘C’est la vie’ and had input it into the Urban Dictionary, a site where colloquialisms and slang can be entered.

The buzz was so strong that New Line went back to the studio to shoot for five extra days to satisfy fans.²⁵ A fan-designed logo even became the official logo for the film, to be released in August 2006.²⁶ One news source even believes that a parody line that appeared on a blog will make it into the film.²⁷

Finally, it may be worth considering Google, since it was not as strong at the time of the earlier study. An upstart search engine is now the primary search engine on the internet, with 80 per cent of searches for the author’s own web site coming from it. Google has branched from its core search service into Google Earth and Gmail, neither of which would appear, on the surface, to be connected to finding information. Google Ads has become a force in the online advertising arena, and might be influential enough to branch into offline advertising.

These three represent three very different parts of the web. Flickr is part of the much-vaunted ‘Web 2·0’, which in a layperson’s terms is a more interactive evolution of the World Wide Web where everyone has a chance to create their own dialogues, networks and web sites, with richer user experiences.²⁸ Snakes on a Plane is an intentionally fleeting choice: it was not set up as an online venture per se, and is merely reflective of a conversation taking place on the web. Google is well known and began as a single application in the time of Web 1·0, but is adding services (and has added services) such as Blogger, representative of Web 2·0.

2.2 Do they fit into the branding scheme?
2.2.1 Flickr.com

Flickr’s offering, however, is simply stated. It is a photo-sharing service, with a difference: it allows users to tag their images, thereby ordering them under different topics. Those searching for images for tsunami, for example, will find all photos with that tag, regardless of photographer. Prior to that, photo-sharing services tended to be grouped by users, so they were shared only as far as one user was able to spread the word.

The idea, perhaps, is not new. Del.icio.us, another Web 2·0 service, allows users to group blog posts. Professional photo libraries have been grouped using keywords. Flickr democratized not just the library, but the ability to create those keywords—tags under the latest parlance. The difference was that there was an intent about sharing, and the site is typical of the “social media” made possible by the internet.

But on the surface it appears to be a well defined company with a single offering, enough to tempt Yahoo! into acquiring it. (Google was reportedly interested, too.) However, the original vision was not necessarily of this service.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, suffering from food poisoning, had a dream about a multi-player game ‘built around sharing photographs.’²⁹ The original Flickr site actually centred on instant messaging with some digital photography support. Early members were gamers and bloggers, with an interest in photography. Butterfield made use of Flickr’s loose vision to emphasize the strength that was emerging from its user base: users who were conversing but setting the tone using digital photography in their instant-messaging.

That same looseness meant a certain level of experimentation, rather than formal research. Flickr noticed where its strengths were by letting users find their own feet and interests.

Flickr does partner with others to spread the word. But rather than through formal alliances, it does this by bringing its users into the fray. Users become the editors for sorting the photographs. In effect, organization and user are on the same side, in an expression of the One principle espoused most heavily by Engeseth.³⁰

Its strongest advocates were its users, and Yahoo!’s own interest came from an email from a ‘Flickr fanatic in Bangalore, India’.³¹ That eventually led to a $30 million deal.

Flickr is now ranked 90th in Alexa, the service that examines where web sites are placed on the web. It can be said to have a strong image, if measured in brand equity terms: it has ever-rising brand awareness, it is positively considered by its users, there is a great deal of loyalty to the service, and its perceived quality is high. The value of its proprietary brand assets—its trademark and intellectual property—may be considered to be high, given what Yahoo! had paid for the company.

Flickr confirms the original criteria set down by the author for a successful online brand.

2.2.2 Snakes on a Plane
Snakes on a Plane is an unusual choice for this paper. It is not a venture, therefore it could not be said to have a vision per se. It is a movie title whose quirkiness led to an initial round of blogging, an article in Wired, and a decision by the studio to shoot for five more days given the buzz on the internet. That prompted more mainstream media coverage.

The author first heard of Snakes on a Plane as Pacific Air 121, when Lucire was first asked to participate in the movie. The studio, New Line, states now that Pacific Air 121 was a working title used to solicit support, though there are claims that it had wanted to change the name to avoid ridicule.

Its Google references have gone up and down since word first got out that Snakes on a Plane was the decided title. Before January 19, 2006, they rested on 96,900, rising to 461,000 by February 1. However, there was a fall from that point: 380,000 on February 5 and 176,000 on February 15. It was New Line’s decision to shoot extra footage that piqued the interest of the mainstream media, and the hits started on an upward trend: by March 25, this had risen to 880,000.

Given there is no “organization” that is called Snakes on a Plane, it is hard to consider if it had a loose vision or not. Perhaps one could say that its producers had an open mind in considering all the attention the film had received on blogs; and that if the vision was “tight”, there would not have been a reshoot. Nevertheless, this inquiry cannot be academically rigorous.

However, other branding aspects can be considered from the perspective of the production company. Evidently, research was informal and inexpensive: the preference for Snakes on a Plane was signalled most by bloggers, not by the studio. Samuel L. Jackson chimed in to say that the title should be retained, but that appears to be a more recent development. Listening and monitoring blogs indicates a willingness to incorporate modern technology in researching how well the Snakes on a Plane title was being received.

The communication of the name has come from not just the studio—New Line pays lip service to it on its web site and snakesonaplanemovie.com, the official site, is barely more than a home page—but from the internet audience. Therefore, the “advocacy requirement” for a successful online venture is more than present—it could even be said now to be Snakes on a Plane’s raison d’être.

The consequences of all this cannot be measured at this time. Providing the interest in the venture does not wane—as it did in February—then Snakes on a Plane will enjoy a sizeable audience. Perhaps with the extra footage, it now will, because New Line was willing to show it would participate in the dialogue with its advocates. Only then can one measure brand equity—whether the brand loyalty is strong enough to be maintained until the film’s release in August.
Snakes on a Plane could be said to be a brand, notwithstanding the absence of a vision. It symbolizes, communicates and differentiates a product. Furthermore, like Star Wars figurines and the like, the Snakes on a Plane name has extended into cups and T-shirts, even if they are not formally merchandised and endorsed by New Line.

But only on certain aspects can one say for sure that Snakes on a Plane fulfils the earlier criteria. However, on those that can be considered at the time of writing, they are met.

2.2.3 Google
There is less similarity between Google and the other two brands examined to date. It is the oldest venture of the three and has received the most coverage. Its name has become so ubiquitous that it is now a verb: to google means to search for something on the internet,³² specifically using the Google web search service.

The history has been dealt with many times before, and is a familiar story: two Stanford University students began tinkering. Larry Page had a fascination for back links pointing to any given web site and built a program to compile them. The offline press began noticing Google as early as 1998. The Google culture, however, was not one of formality. New ideas emerged from Google’s staff and many were implemented, the most famous being Google News. Google never intended to be in the news-editing service, but Google News analysed stories that a web spider found and ranked them on a page of headlines. By 2000, it had introduced AdWords, a keyword-targeted advertising service. Other acquisitions illustrated that Google was not just about search. If it had a tightly defined vision, none of these developments would have been encouraged, let alone see the light of day.

As told by Heilemann in GQ:³³

But beneath the comically clichéd trappings, Google was becoming something interesting—and powerful. Having cut deals with an array of companies, most critically Yahoo, Google was processing more than 100 million searches a day and indexing an unprecedented 1 billion Web pages. Fueling this growth was a relentlessness about innovation. [Founders] Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] were openly, brutally elitist when it came to hiring engineers. (Job applicants, no matter their age, had to submit their college transcripts.) In software and hardware, Google’s innovation was remarkable. Using off-the-shelf components, the company was building what was, in effect, the planet’s largest computing system. And its official mission—“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—extended far beyond searching the Internet.
“I did not understand when I came to the company how broad Larry and Sergey’s vision was,” [Former Novell CEO Eric] Schmidt says. “It took me six months of talking to them to really understand it. I remember sitting with Larry, saying, ‘Tell me again what our strategy is,’ and writing it down.”

At the same time, the boys had fostered an environment that was flamboyantly idealistic. Search was all, profit peripheral, “Don’t be evil” the corporate motto. (Asked later what the slogan meant, Schmidt would say, “Evil is what Sergey says is evil.”)

In short, Larry and Sergey had already encoded the DNA of the company Schmidt was supposed to run. The character they instilled in Google could be summed up in three phrases: Technology matters. We make our own rules. We’ll grow up when we’re damn good and ready.

The boys’ reality took some getting used to for Schmidt. It wasn’t just the dot-com fripperies that fazed him or the dogs trotting up and down the halls. It was the squatter in his office. (The interloper was an engineer frustrated with the bustle in his own shared quarters. After first attempting to evict him, Schmidt gave up and endured the situation for several months.) He also found himself frequently occupied with grounding Larry and Sergey’s flights of fancy. There was the time the boys suggested having Google enter the business of low-cost space launchings. And the time Larry reportedly tried to ban telephones from a new Google office building.

In terms of research, Google relies on the inspiration of its staff. This informality has almost become legendary, shunned by some traditional business experts and praised by those who believe an entrepreneurial style should be maintained by an organization. At its first post-IPO investors’ meeting, Google was so informal its chef wound up explaining the food on the menu—a move heavily criticized by the Wall Street establishment.

Its growth did come from people spreading the word about the search engine. The initial 1998 press came well before Google secured large financing, and was a direct result of everyday users. Given that the late 1990s and early 2000s saw a dot-com downturn, Google weathered this thanks to users spreading the word and, of course, through delivering a quality service.

Its brand equity is strong. The initial public offering, according to CNN, indicated a worth of $24 billion in 2004.³⁴ Its brand loyalty and perceived quality are high, given that rivals have not managed to dethrone Google. Brand awareness can be little higher—Alexa ranks it at no. 2, behind Yahoo!. Google was found to be a top brand according to Brandchannel,³⁵ while branding shop Landor found it in second but predicts a Google win for 2006.³⁶

There is some negativity relating to its more recent developments—offering Red China a censored version of its search engine, Google.cn, for instance³⁷—but not enough to signal that its image has been tarnished in a major way. Again, only recent events have indicated that Google is anything but a dynamic, entrepreneurial and almost anti-establishment firm—even if its founders are multi-billionaires who have the financial worth of the establishment.

Google also confirms the author’s earlier work on the ingredients of a successful online brand, though it may be useful to examine the consequences of its most recent actions in Red China with Google.cn. The Chinese market itself may opt for other services should the political climate change and the people enjoy greater freedom.³⁸

The three brands examined also illustrate that while the author’s earlier work was directed at Australian and New Zealand enterprises, the rules apply in the United States, too. Indeed, the author advances that they are universal, given the global nature of the internet and very similar online browsing habits between all cultures and creeds.

3. Secondary meaning
It may be worth, in a legal inquiry, to see if the online branding model can endow a brand with secondary meaning.

Traditionally, brands have acquired secondary meaning through ‘advertising or massive exposure’, establishing a trademark ‘in the minds of consumers as an indication of origin from one particular source.’³⁹ Tyndall offers a fairly standard explanation:⁴⁰

A descriptive name, word, term, or mark will have achieved secondary meaning when a significant quantity of the consuming public for the goods and/or services in question understand it to refer exclusively to a particular party. …

Courts examine the following factors in determining whether a name, word, term, or trademark has acquired secondary meaning:
1. The length and manner of use;
2. The nature and extent of advertising and promotion; and
3. The efforts made in promoting a conscious connection between the name, word, term, or mark and the product, service, or business in the minds of consumers.

It is accepted that the antecedents of branding, even in an offline model, do not necessarily provide a brand with secondary meaning. This is usually due to insufficient exposure.

In the internet world, where there is a potential global audience, do the standards for secondary meaning differ? The three examples in §2 can be said to have acquired secondary meaning: they cannot be mistaken either for anything else or having been from anyone else but their creators. They had got there without heavy (conventional) advertising or promotion; instead, it was their user bases or fans that propelled them into the minds of consumers in their market-place.

Indeed, an inquiry into the length of use may be less applicable on the internet: Snakes on a Plane has been mentioned only since around August 2005 and has managed 880,000 hits in Google (in seven months). The internet is not the only place where timeframes are more compressed than they were many decades ago: the same pattern can be found in new product development and in the product life cycle.⁴¹

Only the third factor quoted above may be said to have relevance in an inquiry about secondary meaning in online branding.

One approach may be to obtain Alexa statistics of all web sites, making a judgement on each one to see where a cut-off point might lie between online brands that have acquired secondary meaning and those that have not. However, this may prove unreliable: there are offline brands that have ventured online that have a low Alexa ranking⁴² but possess secondary meaning, such as the New Zealand clothing brand Karen Walker.

The best approach is to examine, instead, how well linked they are on the World Wide Web. As advocates will post about their favourite brands, and provide links to them—especially in the age of citizen media or social media—they will get picked up by search engines.

Google, which ranks sites in its index through an algorithm, is best placed as an analysis tool. The algorithm includes a consideration of how many web pages link to a particular site, and even how credible those pages are. It is partly based on web traffic. Further, it is an international consideration, of consumers worldwide, although given the United States’ position as the leading nation on the internet, there will be more American viewpoints covered. It is also, fortunately, independent: no one person can influence the Google algorithm, even if some lawsuits have been started over it.

Flickr, Snakes on a Plane and Google are all unusual words or terms, but Amazon is not. A search for Amazon does not come up with the river, but Amazon.com, the retailer, first. The first mention of the rainforest is the third site. Only two in the top ten do not refer to the retailer. Within its market, it is highly unlikely anyone would consider Amazon to relate to any other organization but Amazon.com.

In short, if a brand has met the criteria from the author’s earlier paper, summarized here, then it can qualify as a ‘strong online brand’. If, in addition to this,⁴³ it has achieved some success in the Google index, then a future court should regard it as having acquired secondary meaning.

4. Summary
Organizations cannot expect to employ the old, offline rules of branding in an online sphere. But at the same time, they cannot expect that the old rules will apply offline, either.

Importantly, the internet has helped identify consumers who are conscious of corporate social responsibility, and public opinion now favours entrepreneurial-style firms over establishment-style ones. These trends have not changed since the author first examined online branding in a pre-9-11 paper.

But even more vitally, the democratization of media—the emergence of citizen media or social media—has meant that individuals have become brand advocates. Online brands find success through tapping in to their respective advocates, providing them with a “reason to spread” their names. Those that follow these requirements have found success, and some of 2006’s most talked-about brands—new, fleeting and established—have done so, by and large, perhaps unwittingly.

This has an impact on the way secondary meaning is to be considered by the courts, changing drastically any consideration into advertising. This needs to be replaced by a consideration of “chatter” on the World Wide Web, resulting in links or a high Google ranking. Secondly, the consideration into time needs to be altered, as brands can be built on the internet at a rapid pace.

The internet has forced such changes that few organizations can have an offline-only existence, so the processes described in this paper need to be considered in any branding exercise or inquiry into a brand’s or trademark’s secondary meaning.

Notes
1. LL B, BCA (Hons.), MCA. CEO, Jack Yan & Associates (http://jya.net); President, JY&A Consulting (http://jya.net/ consulting).
2. W. Olins: The New Guide to Identity. Aldershot: Gower 1995.
3. N. Ind: Living the Brand: How to Transform Every Member of Your Organization into a Brand Champion, 2nd ed. London: Kogan Page 2004.
4. N. Ind (ed.): Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands. London: Kogan Page 2003.
5. S. Engeseth: One: a Consumer Revolution in Business. London: Cyan Books 2006.
6. Many of the papers discussing online brand-building are general, without creating a credible model. See, for example, the papers collected at Allaboutbranding.com.
7. J. Yan: ‘Online branding: an antipodean experience’, in Kim, Ling, Lee and Park (eds.): Human Society and the Internet. Berlin: Springer 2001, pp. 185–202.
8. J. Yan: ‘The attitude of identity’, Desktop, October 2000, pp. 26–31.
9. W. Olins: The New Guide, op. cit.
10. N. Klein: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador 2000.
11. J. Yan: ‘The attitude of identity’, op. cit.
12. Brand managers could well become managers of consumer perceptions some day, helping guide them and feeding them back into the corporate vision. The brand could become a pluralistic “collective of perceptions”, rather than a single idea under the current model. So far, that has not happened, but it is a logical outcome of today’s trends.
13. Op. cit.
14. D. A. Aaker: Building Strong Brands. New York: Free Press 1991.
15. Secondary meaning arises when consumers have come to identify a trademark with its owner over time.
16. J. Yan: ‘Online branding’, op. cit.
17. Ibid., at p. 186.
18. J. Engel, R. Blackwell and P. Miniard: Consumer Behavior, 6th ed. Chicago: Dryden Press 1990.
19. J. Yan: ‘Online branding’, op. cit., a p. 186; q.v. S. T. Cavusgil and S. Zou: ‘Marketing strategy-performance relationship: an investigation of the empirical link in export market ventures’, Journal of Marketing, vol. 58, 1994, pp. 1–21; and R. Dau and P. Thirkell: ‘The relationship between marketing orientation and export performance: further empirical evidence’, Proceedings of the 1996 Australia–New Zealand Marketing Educators’ Conference. Wellington 1996, pp. 369–86.
20. J. Yan, ibid.
21. Ibid., pp. 190 ff.
22. The term is a misnomer, since anti-brands work on the same principles as brands when it comes to the branding process. However, the vision will generally include a rejection of undesirable, unethical behaviour and the embracing of principles including fair wages and the use of sustainable resources.
23. J. McClellan: ‘Tag team’, The Guardian, February 3, 2005, <http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1403974,00.html>.
24. E. Steuer: ‘The best worst movie of the year’, Wired, vol. 14, no. 1, January 2006, <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/play.html>.
25. B. Kit: ‘Fan frenzy for “Snakes” is on a different plane’, The Hollywood Reporter, March 23, 2006, <http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ thr/film/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002234847&imw=Y>.
26. C. Elsworth: ‘Cult film fans are bitten by Snakes on a Plane’, The Electronic Telegraph, March 25, 2006, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml? xml=/news/2006/03/25/wsnakes25.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/03/25/ixworld.html>.
27. B. Kit, op. cit.
28. Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media Inc. notes the seven ingredients of a Web 2·0 firm as: (a) services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability; (b) control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them; (c) trusting users as co-developers; (d) harnessing collective intelligence; (e) leveraging the long tail through customer self-service; (f) software above the level of a single device; (g) lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models (original emphasis). See T. O’Reilly: ‘What is Web 2·0’, O’Reilly.net, September 30, 2005, <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/ 2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html>.
29. E. Schonfeld: ‘The Flickrization of Yahoo’, Business 2·0, December 2005, pp. 156–65.
30. S. Engeseth, op. cit.; and S. Engeseth: Detective Marketing: Creative Common Sense in Business, 3rd ed. Stockholm: Stefan Engeseth Publishing 2003.
31. E. Schonfeld, op. cit.
32. The author believes the first high-profile usage of the term was in Maid in Manhattan, a film released in 2002. See J. Yan: ‘Branding to youth: the forces at work’, address to Sales and Marketing Executives International, Auckland, New Zealand, March 11, 2003, <http://www.jackyan.com/files/stuff-030311-smeiauckland.shtml>.
33. J. Heilemann: ‘Journey to the (revolutionary, evil-hating, cash-crazy, and possibly self-destructive) center of Google’, Men.style.com, <http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_422>.
34. ‘Google IPO priced at $85 a share’, CNN.com, August 19, 2004, <http://edition.cnn.com/2004/BUSINESS/08/19/google.ipo/>.
35. R. Rusch: ‘The search is over: Google wins in 2005’, Brandchannel, January 23, 2006.
36. ‘Brands in the news: winners and losers’, USA Today, December 28, 2005, <http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/ 2005-12-29-hot-brands-chart.htm>.
37. See, e.g. M. Dickie: ‘Google to launch censored China service’, The Financial Times, January 25, 2006, <http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0cf3fc52-8d0b-11da-9daf-0000779e2340.html>.
38. J. Yan: ‘Yahoo! and Google kowtow—would I?’, Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog, February 11, 2006, <http://www.jackyan.com/blog/2006/02/yahoo-and-google-kowtowwould-i.html>.
39. Black’s Law Dictionary, 5th ed. St Paul: West Publishing Co. 1979.
40. J. M. Tyndall: ‘Secondary meaning’, United States Trademark Law Overview, 2002, <http://home.att.net/~jmtyndall/ustm/secondary.htm>.
41. See, e.g. K. B. Clark, and S. C. Wheelwright (eds.): The Product Development Challenge: Competing through Speed, Quality, and Creativity. Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1995.
42. J. Yan: ‘Online branding’, op. cit., pp. 197–8.
43. The two need to be considered together as the inquiry should be whether a brand has acquired secondary meaning, not a common word or phrase which may appear in the Google index.

This paper has also appeared in CAP Online.