The Good Brand

It has been a tumultuous year in the wonderful world of branding. Exciting new brands, such as iPod, hit their stride; respected older brands, such as Martha Stewart, faltered; and classic brands, such as Mustang, proved they still have juice. Destination branding, from Las Vegas to Jordan, took off. A brand called Mark Burnett teamed with a brand called Trump to produce the season's hottest TV show, which turned out to be as much a paean to brands as it was a celebration of cutthroat American capitalism.

But perhaps the most significant and ominous development in recent branding history is the emergence of Mecca-Cola, the ideologically driven brainchild of rabidly anti-Zionist French entrepreneur Tawfik Mathlouthi. With its red can adorned with white script, the soda is clearly designed as a challenge to the world's number-one brand. And as if its packaging weren't explicit enough, its tagline, "No more drinking stupid, drink with commitment," is an in-your-face repudiation of the American icon.

While Mecca's message was the most strident dispatch in the branding wars, it also, ironically, summed up some of the most potent themes currently roiling the waters: the debate over global versus local messaging and control; the power of brands to create and reflect social and cultural values; the pressure for brands to be authentic; and the need for companies to recognize a brand's stakeholders (beyond its customers).

Carried aloft by the Internet, and reinforced by the echo chamber of a million always-on consumers, brands have seen their power expand and grow. But that growth has also spawned problems and opportunities that brand managers a decade ago could never have envisioned. Indeed, there may be no more challenging time to figure out a brand strategy than today.

To get a sense of trends shaping the current branding landscape, we talked with experts from New York to New Zealand, and tagged along at a meeting organized by futurist think tank Global Business Network. We identified seven trends that are likely to influence the conversation for the year to come.

1. Brands will be authentic.

Long before Enron and WorldCom were exposed as frauds, consumers had begun scrutinizing brands to find the truth behind the image. Did Nike use sweatshop labor to make its shoes? Did McDonald's lard its products with fat? Aided by the Internet, consumers can now know almost everything about a company. Chris Riley, founder and chief strategist of Studioriley, a company that specializes in creating economically, socially, and environmentally "healthy" brands, says companies must now reckon with an increasingly visible value chain. He tells of a teenager in a Nike focus group in Los Angeles picking an Air Jordan shoe out of a pile and identifying the exact factory in Vietnam where it had been made. "Branding is a way of articulating the core values of the corporation," says Riley. "Companies need to project into the world who they really are."

With cynicism about corporations at an all-time high, companies are under pressure to prove that what they stand for is something more than better, faster, newer, more. A company that can demonstrate it's doing good and doing well -- think Ben & Jerry's, or Aveda (see page 50) -- will find its brand image enhanced, Riley says. But consumers must sense that the actions are sincere and not a PR stunt that will evaporate as soon as the cameras are turned off.

2. The experience will be the expression of the brand.

Ten years ago, it would have been hard to imagine building a national brand with little or no advertising. Then along came Krispy Kreme, Google, and Amazon.com. They're among a small group of hugely powerful brands that gained prominence without once appearing on . Brian Collins, executive creative director of the Brand Integration Group at Ogilvy & Mather, says brands are moving from a marketing model that says, "I'm going to talk to you and you better listen up" to an experiential model. "Marketers need to focus on the way a brand gets brought to life tangibly, where it really lives," says Collins. Whether it's the folksy humor of Southwest Airlines' flight attendants, the boudoirlike ambience of a Victoria's Secret shop, or the Zen-like simplicity of TiVo's remote control, the experience conveys the essence of the brand. And often, it's design that creates the experience.

That design message must now be distinctive enough to hold its energy in a vast array of places: in a magazine, on a T-shirt, on a coffee mug, at a skate park, on the subway, or blown up 10 stories high on a billboard in Times Square. "It's a lot of work," Collins says, "and you must sweat the details."