Building a successful brand

Thanks to advances in travel and the development of the internet brand, competition has become increasingly intense over the last thirty years and building a successful brand and providing a return to investors has become very difficult.

The challenges appear to be overwhelming, especially with many companies operating on a quarter-to-quarter basis for fear of a negative reaction from the stock market and stockholders, especially in a post-recession climate.

But there is a way companies can effectively negate fluctuations in stocks and roller-coaster economies - build a brand. Put simply, any product can be copied but a brand cannot.

There are plenty of challenges to brand building that make it hard to convince investors to pump cash into doing so, such as a modern obsession with short-term objectives and opportunities to make your money work for itself on the market but if you get it right, the rewards are limitless.

Brand building is far from a new idea but as mentioned above, thanks to technological advances, today's consumers have more access to information and more choices than ever before.

Google's innovative branding techniques

The best thing to do is to look at examples of how the very best have done it. If you look at how one of the most fresh faced big brands have got where they are, it's easy to see the importance of brand building. A little over a decade since the search engine's launch, we can learn from Google's innovative branding techniques.

When Sergei Brin and Larry Page set up Google Inc. in a California garage back in 1998 the two founders had big plans for their company, but even they would have been stunned to learn that 12 years later Google would become arguably the biggest brand in the world.

Google proved that a heavy dependence on market research is not necessary. The tech firm's initial success was down to brilliance and innovation moving at a pace most of the world could not keep up with. But they didn't make the mistake of trying to meet all of the immediate needs of the consumer and were willing to invest in what they believed consumers would benefit from in the future. Look at UK company Amstrad who didn't move very far from the personal computer, and the best they could come up with after some early success was an email phone that wanted to charge people for sending emails because that was the tech darling of the time. Where are they now?

Expensive advertising no longer necessary

Google are also a perfect example of how traditional, expensive advertising is no longer necessary in today's business world. Google was built without any ads. Instead, it used two cheaper and far more effective brand building tools: viral marketing and public relations.

The California-based tech giant also quickly learnt that change was far more important than consistency when developing a brand.

But take Coca-Cola; introduced in 1886 and developed in a time far removed from today's high-tech world, Coke is now the only true ubiquitous brand known today.

They went about things pretty differently to Google, but have developed a brand so strong it is pretty much untouchable. Even a shift in global health consciousness worldwide has done nothing to jeopardize the brand. With the population gearing toward a healthier lifestyle, carbonated drinks' consumption has undergone a rapid decrease. However, Coca-Cola simply broadened their product offering to include sub-brands under the main Coca-Cola brand including teas, health drinks, bottled water and others. It was a clever move, one that was imminent and endlessly rewarding for the early adopters.

A strong brand is the key to surviving any major shocks the business world may encounter, a theory that is seriously being put to the test today as Toyota struggle to defend the technical faults in some of its models that has lead to a dizzying media circus.

Check out the infographic to see which companies have built a brand strong enough to be named amongst the most successful in the world.

Related Articles:

The art of building brand identity | The amazing world of Coca-Cola | Wal-Mart: the biggest company on the planet

Daniel Jones

Daniel is a Politics and Philosophy graduate from Cardiff University where he also worked as a section editor on the award winning student newspaper. After university he joined an IT support company where he was a B2B online writer. He loves anything to do with sport and joined GDS in July 2009.

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