ABSTRACT
The emergence of the significance of the role of the brand in innovation throughout the early and mid-1990s, highlighted in Part 1, was fundamentally linked to an ever-increasing inter-relationship between the company, its products and the brand(s) that it used to both promote and represent these. In the vast majority of cases this was underpinned by interaction between the brand values or propositions and the products or services that the company itself delivered into the markets. The increasing prominence of the brand and the associated rise in brand value for companies as diverse as Microsoft, Coca Cola, IBM, Citibank, Mercedes and even Intel, highlighted by their relative positioning in Interbrand's annual brand survey, were all largely driven by, and linked to, the software, drinks, servers, financial services, cars and microchips that they respectively provided. As new arrivals in the brand value leaders, such as Starbucks, Amazon and Cisco, grew through delivering innovative new products and services, maximizing corporate value was, in an ever-increasingly prominent manner, significantly influenced by how they created, developed, nurtured and deployed their brands to support their products and vice versa. At this time there was, however, limited exploitation of brand equity outside companies’ core product portfolios.
