100 Top Global Brands. part2

 

More people have heard the coke melodic theme

 then the anthem of any single religion. A truly sobering

 thought.  , more people have seen the Coke logo 

then the symbol of any single religion! A truly scary thought. 

 

Earn Permission to Grow In 1998, Hyundai's reputation in the U.S. was so ravaged by a decade of quality problems that the South Korean company considered pulling up stakes. Chung Mong Koo took over that year and began reinventing how Hyundai viewed quality. A carmaker without a U.S. presence, he reckoned, could never be a global brand.

Quality improved, but Hyundai was still far behind. So Chung devised an aggressive strategy: Until at least 2008, Hyundai models would carry a 100,000-mile/10-year warranty to give customers peace of mind. This created hundreds of millions of dollars a year in extra provision costs, of course. Meanwhile, Chung ordered plant managers to obsess about quality, even to stop production lines if defects were detected. The practice was common in Japan and catching on in the U.S. but still unheard of in Korea.

The moves paid off. In the U.S., Hyundai saw its sales grow from less than 100,000 in 1998 to 455,012 last year. Global brand value climbed an impressive 17% last year. In the latest quality scores from J.D. Power & Associates, released in June, Hyundai was the top-rated nonluxury brand ahead of Toyota. That now gives Hyundai the street cred, for example, to sell its new Azera sedan, which costs close to $30,000 and has been compared seriously to the Chrysler 300, Toyota Avalon, and Buick Lucerne.

Having earned stripes from critics, Hyundai says it's looking for more creative validation as it contemplates a sub-brand to compete with Lexus and Cadillac. "One important objective of our brand is to create emotional connection with our clients," says Nam Myung Hyun, general manager for brand strategy. It shouldn't be too hard. Americans love an underdog, especially one that has learned new tricks.

Make Simplicity King When Gerard Kleisterlee took the helm of Royal Philips Electronics in 2001, the Dutch conglomerate's empire included TVs, lighting, medical devices, and semiconductors. The missing key: a coherent brand. "We had to choose whether Philips was a company built around its core technologies or one built around its core brand," says Kleisterlee, who presided over a healthy 14% gain in global brand value last year.

He wisely chose the latter. In doing so he had to shake up the way the company thought about customers and communication without alienating the engineering and science units critical to innovation. In 2004 its "Sense and Simplicity" global branding effort launched. The idea is to create a "health-care, lifestyle, and technology" company that offers easy-to-use products designed around the consumer. To get the effort on track, the CEO created an internal think tank, the Simplicity Advisory board, comprised entirely of Philips outsiders: a British fashion designer, a Chinese architect, an American radiologist, and an American Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.

The board looks at overarching questions like: How does simplicity get executed? Their strategic advice changed the way the company thinks, leading to a series of new, user-friendly products. It wasn't enough to design a small defibrillator that could be stashed in public spaces such as airports and workplaces. Consumers dictated that it be the size of a laptop and simple enough that the untrained could spark a heart back to life in seconds using built-in audio instructions. There's also Perfect Draft, a home draft-beer dispenser that's a twist on Philips' hugely successful Senseo coffee machines.