Business Week has just published its latest annual rankings of The 100 Most Valuable Global Brands. Their "best" and "worst" lists and commentary are a stimulating read about the game of branding and a chance to think about how professional services firms are thinking about brands.
The BW list is weighted heavily toward products companies, not surprisingly, because of their research requirement that the studied brand must: "derive about a third of its earnings outside its home country, be recognizable outside of its base of customers, and have publicly available marketing and financial data be from public companies." That eliminates even some of the largest and most prominent PSFs.
Many of the ranked brands are synonymous with their company's name. Probably the closest one to our professional services purview is business-to-business services giant Accenture. UPS, and several branded financial services houses (Morgan Stanley, UBS, American Express) fall into this category too. Why don't more professional service firms pursue a "branded house" approach like this, instead of the often-tempting house-of-brands approach?
The list neatly summarizes the strategic brand shifts that many companies are making. Take a look at Yahoo!, Reuters and ING. How many professional service firms have yet to identify their core brand, or how best to evolve it?
I've written recently about professional service firms adopting celebrity spokesmen and brand characters. The BusinessWeek list features a number of notable flops in this tactic (imagine Sylvester Stallone's High Protein Pudding!). What does having a celebrity spokesman do to enhance a professional service firm's "brand identity" in ways the firm couldn't do itself?
For those large public professional service companies, how do Business Week's rankings stimulate your thinking about the VALUE of your brand? Your firm?
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