ABSTRACT
As recently as 1993 when, on ‘Marlboro Friday’, the financial markets cut Philip Morris’s value by $13 billion in one day, marketing gurus declared ‘Brands are dead’. If it could happen to Marlboro, it could happen to any brand and the media quickly proclaimed the 1990s a ‘value decade’, arguing that consumers would always shop for the lowest price and would buy only on sale. Within two years, however, Marlboro’s US market share reached an alltime high of 31 per cent as Philip Morris created a ‘Marlboro steamroller’ based on a strategy of doubling advertising spend and cutting back on coupons and price-off programmes which ‘cheapened the Marlboro image’.1 It does seem that predictions of the death of brands were premature and today branding is as powerful a global marketing device as ever. Furthermore, when many Western marketers were moving away from brand-building, their Asian counterparts were energetically building theirs up and the Asian success has been to build brands not around products, but around reputations. The great Asian names imply quality, price and innovation rather than a specific item; they are ‘attribute brands’ which relate to a set of values. Thus, Mitsubishi is everything from a bank, to a car manufacturer, to a textiles and an electrical goods manufacturer. In fact, Mitsubishi is not a single company at all but a brand name that belongs to several companies.
