Brand Building and Marketing in Key Emerging Markets – 25 Strategies and Frameworks for Brand Growth

In the upcoming months we will introduce the 25 strategies that will be useful in building your brand and business in key emerging markets. Today, we have a look at which factors influence your brand perception in the local market.

Understanding your local brand perception

Knowledge is power. Therefore, successful brands have a clear understanding of local strengths and challenges of their brand in order to constantly improve its performance.

Brand development requires not only a solid understanding of the market and of local consumer needs and wants, but also a profound understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your global and local competitors in the particular market. Based on many brand research projects involving all kinds of brands across the BRIC´s, there is one lesson that is striking: There is almost no brand that can claim to have a completely consistent global positioning – especially in the large growth markets with their huge emerging middle classes.

Since a brand is defined as “the consumer´s idea of a product or service”, its positioning depends on whom you ask about it. Consumers in the transitional markets greatly differ in terms of level of experience, value orientations and views of the world. Consequently, they usually perceive most foreign brands in a very different way as compared to their Western peers.

They might like or buy the same brands, however, they usually do it for different reasons. For example, IKEA is positioned as a friendly value brand for build-it-yourself furniture. However, for most consumers in the emerging markets IKEA is a very aspirational premium brand that makes international design accessible. This simple example illustrates that a global brand that is 100% consistently positioned across the globe remains one of the greatest illusions in the history of marketing.

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