Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Nestle
South African Breweries
American Express
Visa
Coca-Cola
And hundreds more...

I will be happy to assist you professionally on this if you will contact me.

As I've travel around the world, I sometimes run into co-branding efforts in this type of situation. If I'm not mistaken, when HP bought Compaq, they kept the Compaq name for more than just consumer productsin Latin America and co-branded marketing materials.

In some cases the parent company co-brands with the local brand only until the population associates one with the other and then it becomes easier to transition. However, caution must be taken to insure that the local population is not opposed to the foreign brand. Also, depending on the business you're in, a foreign brand may be beneficial (see Jack Trout's Global Positioning webinare here on Marketing Profs). Much depends on the industry you're in. I suspect that the more niche your business, the easier I suspect it is to transition under one brand umbrella.

Check out Weatherford International for an example of B2B company in the SME sector who grew through acquisitions. AIG often co-brands acquisitions, such as AIG SunAmerica.

There are many companies that fit the general description: Barnstead International (before it was sucked up by Fisher Scientific) is one I'm most familiar with.

"Consolidating brands" may not describe the need so much as Rationalizing. Because brands exist in the mind of the customer, and because sales and profitablity rather than streamlined brands is the goal, you'll want to evaluate margins, costs, demand, value to customers, and position in their specific markets. Look at perhaps establishing a matrix for separate markets to better define the brands' relative values.

The names only really matter insofar they have meaning to your customers. Define their relationship to the brands.

Best wishes,
Jaime Collins

Your challenge is all about Naming Architecture and usability ...case studies are mostly not important in this case as what works for FedEx does not for UPS...Starbuck the darling of case studies for every speaker at every conference, is no longer pertinent.

How to balance names ona global chart demands a nomenclature expertise.

Names drive the image brands and not the logos. Study the Five Star Standard of Naming avaiable on the Internet and become an expert on this side of the issue.

Good naming will save you all the wasted budgets and also give you the real brand power in the long run.

All the best

KW

Regional/local brand building - General Motors (Opel in Europe, Vauxhall in the UK plus many sub-brands).

Nestle has had a progressive approach to brand management. Local intermediate brands (eg Rowntree) have been phased out while slowly extending the reach of it's major brand portfolio out of their original regional basis (eg KitKat).

In b2b markets, any company that has grown through acquisition - eg Hanson, ABB, Vestas, EDF, E.On (in Europe currently there is a lot of amalgamation of utilities across countries). In relationship-based B2B markets, brand is less important than the working relationship.

The route you take will depend on many factors and any answers here will be simplistic ideas but I would suggest that it would be a combination of a master house brand plus champion brands in key sectors that can be rolled out globally. The master house brand would sweep up the smaller brands over time, whilst the champion brands would become valuable global properties in themselves.

I'm sure you've done it, but I would start with a brand audit marking brands as strong or weak and necessary or unnecessary. Weak and unnecessary you remove. Weak and necessary you place under the house brand. Strong and unnecessary you sell and strong and necessary are your champions to expand globally.

car companies. different car names and car designs for different countries.

Unless you are the top tier Fortune 100, you should avoid the global brand name models of GE, IBM, Microsoft....

If you are already the top tier mid size MNC, simply get highly custom and pricise evaluation of the entire global name branding options..

master-branding was a trap created by agencies to find a global name solution for mega companies as creating regional top quality naming became so difficult.

today some of the big struggling giants are stuck in single so called master brand name identities

I am sure you will the answer by going deep into it