Building China's Global Brands

The Chinese economy has been growing rapidly for several years. Important competitive strengths have included efficient operations. Going forward, skills beyond operations capabilities are required for success in global markets. In particular, in the global economy, long run success is often associated with strong brands. Many Chinese organizations have been successful in strengthening their brands. Yet, Chinese organizations must continue to strengthen their brands as well as manage and maintain their existing brands. Building strong global brands requires a much broader perspective than building local brands. Positioning and coordinating global brands requires the ability to evaluate many markets at the same time, including markets that at present are only potential markets. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how Chinese organizations can build and strengthen global brands and the implications for the global strategies they can employ and the skills they need.

Managing Brands at Risk

Since crises have become an inevitable, natural feature of the business world, managing brands during crisis has also become an important source of competitive advantage. Thus, there is a growing need to understand determinants of crisis, which have become an integral part of today's world. The aim of this chapter is to explain the determinants of successful brand management during crises based on the case of Turkey. Crises may arise for various reasons, such as natural disasters, accidents, financial/political/product harm-related problems, product recall incidents, and many others. Since brands are very affected by many dynamic forces—political-economic-social and technological—brand managers need to be prepared to overcome crises without harming the brand equity. Moreover, the integration of brand management theory, which originated and was dominated by Western researchers, with recent case examples from an emerging country, constitutes the originality of the chapter. In this chapter, two boycott cases, an airplane disaster case and a product recall case, from Turkey are summarized to contribute to the existing Western literature.

Self-Brand Congruity and Brand Communication

Brand communication through advertising plays an important role in developing strong brands in emerging markets, especially in India. This chapter investigates how ethnocentrism moderates the effects of advertising adaptation levels (globalization, glocalization, and localization) on Indian consumers' ad evaluation and self-brand congruity. It uses self-brand congruity to explain the psychological reasons behind the Indian consumers' preferential patterns of the levels of advertising adaptation. A 2 (local celebrity, global celebrity) x 2 (local verbal cues, global verbal cues) full factorial between-subjects experiment is set up with 219 Indian consumers. Ethnocentrism is measured at the individual level. Results show that highly ethnocentric individuals respond more positively (attitude towards the ad and self-brand congruity) to localization and glocalization advertising strategies compared to a globalization strategy, while lowly ethnocentric individuals do not respond differently to these strategies. The practical and theoretical implications as well as suggestions for further research are discussed.

Influence of Trust and Affect on Brand Loyalty and Brand Performance

Television channels in India are multiplying every day, and there is intense competition to garner viewers. In this tussle, brand building becomes essential, and garnering customer loyalty is essential to stay in the market. In this context, this chapter explores the role of trust and affect in creating loyalty and influencing brand performance of television channels in the Indian context. The conceptual model is an adaptation of Chaudhuri and Holbrook's (2001) chain of effects study of trust, affect, purchase loyalty, and attitudinal loyalty. This chapter also reviewed journalism literature, and certain constructs were adapted from such studies so there is an amalgam of both brand building and journalism disciplines to give validity to the application of the conceptual model for television channels. The results indicate that affect creates a strong impact on brand loyalty, and loyalty also has a strong impact on brand performance. The strength of the chapter lies in the fact that it applies brand management principles to the media sector where the industry follows such practices but academic studies are very few in number.

Appellation of Origin Brands in China

Appellation of origin brands are largely based on the geographical characteristics where the products may possess certain unique features due to suitable climate and abundant natural resources, but are also derived from historical heritage that a particular place is well known for its unique product and production. Therefore, such brands are typically named based on two components: the geographic designation and the product. For centuries, it has become a common practice in China that a producer uses its product place part of its brand name. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the Chinese Appellation of Origin Brands (AOBs), particularly exploring their unique characteristics, their development process, and the environmental factors that influence their brand performance.

Luxury Consumers and Luxury Brand Management in China

Luxury consumption in emerging markets is strongly influenced by Western consumer culture. However, few academic studies have investigated the psychology and behavior of these consumers. China is one of the most important emerging luxury markets. The aim of this chapter is to investigate Chinese consumer behavior and motives regarding luxury consumption. The authors validate an updated version of Wiedmann et al.'s (2009) scale of luxury value perceptions in China to better understand Chinese consumers' luxury consumption motivations. A segmentation of Chinese luxury consumers is performed to characterize different consumption tendencies. The implications of these results are linked to an analysis of selected Chinese luxury brands to explore the avenues that may lead Chinese luxury brands to success.

Brand Positioning through Print Advertising

Due to rapid economic development and a burgeoning middle class, China has attracted consumer market competition from around the world. The market environment in China, however, is culturally complex. Juxtaposed between traditional Eastern values and Western materialism, China presents unique challenges regarding brand positioning. Within this scope of inquiry, the authors explore an important aspect of positioning: consumer product branding through print advertising. Specifically, they explore the demographic makeup of models/spokespeople, look at differences between domestic and foreign brands, and postulate how such advertising choices influence brand perceptions. The results show that Chinese domestic brands prefer Asian models. Interestingly, multinational firms appear to be choosing young, mostly male, Asian models. This is an important shift in branding and garners support for “localization” strategies for Chinese markets.

Trust and Commitment

Based on the integrated perspectives of Generation Differences (GD) and Intergenerational Influences (IGI), this chapter explores the attitudes of China's consumers towards a time-honored brand. A survey study on 2,083 subjects from four cities of China using a door-to-door questionnaire was conducted in two phases (2007 and 2009). The results indicate a decline in the evaluation of trust and commitment down the generations and a significant difference between the old and the young generations, especially in commitment evaluation. The results also show that in consumer behavior of Chinese city households influence on the parents from children is more significant and pronounced than influence on children from parents. This influence weakens rather than strengthens the commitment effect caused by the parents' trust in time-honored brands. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed.

Customer-Based Corporate Brand Equity (CBCBE) In Business-to-Business Firms

Performance of corporate brands is turning out to be a very significant metric in gauging the degree of firm performance. In a B2B setting, corporate brands are of larger importance and greater relevance. From a strategic marketing perspective, this chapter looks at market orientation as a crucial antecedent to corporate brand performance, which is measured through a new construct: Customer-Based Corporate Brand Equity (CBCBE). In the backdrop of Indian B2B firms, a dyadic analysis is performed to eke out the relationship in order to fill the spaces glaring in this domain of marketing literature. The presence of innovativeness as a strategic marketing mediator positively influences this association between market orientation and corporate brand performance focusing on the individualities of emerging markets.

How Consumer Mindset Response and Long-Term Marketing Effectiveness Differ in Emerging vs. Mature Markets

This chapter develops a conceptual framework based on different dynamics in consumer attitudes. Empirical analysis seeks to illustrate this framework with emerging and mature market data for the same brands over the same time period. The results generate important implications, especially for brand management in emerging markets. First, the emotional brand connection, judged so important in mature markets, is substantially less important than securing the brand's spot in the consumers' consideration set. Second, emerging market consumers are more willing to seek out distribution channels for their brands, reducing the “compromised choice” due to less-than-perfect distribution coverage. Third, price is a double-edged sword in emerging markets: a high price benefits sales through consideration but hurts sales through liking. The net impact of these influences shapes the long-run sales effects of marketing. In particular, long-run advertising and price elasticity is higher, while long-run distribution elasticity is lower in emerging markets compared to mature markets.