A new book titled Brand Breakout by Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp outlines strategies that are used by emerging market firms to achieve worldwide recognition for their brands. The author summarizes both winning and losing strategies as well as associated threats for such companies.
What’s Inside?
Providing a high-level summary of a new book titled Brand Breakout by Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, the author outlines strategies that emerging market firms use to win recognition for their brands globally. Such an achievement seems to be correlated with higher profitability. The author reviews examples of such strategies, including both winning and losing scenarios.
How Is This Article Useful to Practitioners?
The author reviews some of the eight paths that Kumar and Steenkamp argue that emerging market firms follow to increase awareness of their brands among customers around the world. One strategy involves achieving strong market penetration with a good product that is inexpensive and then follow it by gradually yet relentlessly increasing the quality and prices. Another strategy is to gain popularity among business customers first and then work on gaining consumers. Another approach concentrates on following the migration of the company’s products from the country of origin—for example, consumers will look for a product back home that they found in another country. Another path is to expand the company by buying well-established Western brands or other already relatively strong brands. Kumar and Steenkamp also mention three strategies followed by companies whose countries of origin are known for unsatisfactory quality levels. The last strategy involves gaining publicity as national champions.
Such strategies can be both successful and unsuccessful. Moreover, even winning desired recognition can be fatal for company finances if the effort taken is too big and the achieved profitability not enough to generate sufficient return on investment. Some companies may also be xenophobic and may be reluctant to employ foreign managers who understand the specifics of target countries. The result is that these types of companies have to learn from their own mistakes.
The article may be of interest to academics working in the field of economics and marketing (particularly branding and international trade relations), as well as to practitioners, namely strategists or brand-building professionals considering future employment possibilities. There is some usefulness for investment-related professionals in terms of learning about strategies of emerging market corporations.
Abstractor’s Viewpoint
The article presents a concise outline of emerging market brand-building strategies. Because it is journalistic, it has no particular scientific value, but it provides a chance for investment professionals to gain better understanding of specific actions taken by such companies.