Monday, May 09, 2011

Brand New Day, Bold New World, Of Global Brands Popularity

There was a time, even in the 1950s and 1960s, when you could go to the least developed place in the world, that had no electricity or running water, yet be sure to find just a select few brands recognized by everyone, not just the educated elite in those countries.

These most definitely were Coke and Mercedes Benz, and perhaps a handful of others. In the 1970s and 1980s Levi's and Pepsi, started showing up. Even though some technology companies like IBM were doing business globally, they were unknown or irrelevant to the masses.

That is not the case today. As I tweeted today:

World Top 10 Brands: Apple top, Google, IBM follow - http://bit.ly/iRdI5Z

Not only is a technology (and increasingly consumer electronics now) company, Apple, the world's most valuable brand, it displaced another technology company, Google. To show the trend even more clearly, IBM actually rose up, to become number 3.

Other global brand stalwarts like McDonald's, and especially Coke, have fallen.

They remain in the Top 10, but it is amazing to see the impact technology has had on the global society in just a few years. Don't forget, it was literally 10 years ago that Apple, coming back from near death in the late 1990s with the Return Of Jobs, launched the iPod and MacOS X.

Ten to twenty years ago most people in the world would not know the difference between Unix and other similar sounding words. Today, the world's most valued brand is based on Unix, a variant of MacOS X running on Mac, iPad, iPhone, and counting.

Today we may think that Cloud Computing (or the impact it has) is limited to big corporations. I daresay, there is nothing stopping Cloud vendors of today from being the Apple of tomorrow.

Steve Jobs, and Apple, see that, as we know from their acquisition ($4.5 million!) of the icloud.com domain name. But, surely there will be many more new entrants of today that could be on that Top 10 List in 2020, if they have the vision.

What do you think? Will your brand be one of them? And, what are you doing today to make it happen?

© Imran Anwar

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