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Meltdown
Creates New Global Champions
BY
NASEEM JAVED 
We have now arrived right in the middle of that
second half of the hyper-accelerated phase, where western brands start
to fall like dominos. In the US alone hundreds of its world-class
brands are being erased, from monster banking to mega manufacturing,
some 73,000 stores alone being closed in the first half of 2009
according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, overall a
Trillion-dollars worth of branding imagery that took decades of image
building is getting scrubbed out worldwide. The damage so huge it can
possibly be seen from the space, as streets are less bright and the
cities are dimmer.
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The
famous sky-high brand evaluations claiming values in tens of billion
dollars are just about irrelevant now. The customers of the world now
brag about their brand loyalty by stating the billions in bailouts given
to their brands as or by size of their bankruptcy.
The passage of 2008, where record-breaking losses were added to the tune
of 30.1trillion dollars in market evaluations according to Bloomberg is
not just a tidy folder of time pulled from the Julian calendar it's
rather a real basket case. Something that started years ago will take
years to sort out. But nevertheless
it will create a forced change and alter the course to all aspects of
our lives. This direct hit of the financial meteor wiping out a
generational thinking will create a new landscape with chasms and voids
that will have to be filled by new image leaders and new type of brand
champions from far away lands and this will
surely create new imagery towards new dynamics and positive changes.
USA once again has a great opportunity to fully demonstrate a grand
scale nationwide rags-to-riches story, something which is not only a
very original American craft but also no other nation of the world has
ever achieved this level of proven mastery of grassroots
entrepreneurialism. Therefore, when all combined, these turbulences will
lead to some amazing new global-scale-cyber-models pointing to brand new
style of delivery of good and services. There will be an explosion of
change, from paperless newspapers, shopping-center-less shopping to
office-less offices. For the last half century growth was always
measured by structural extensions but now it will be expressed more by
cyber reach of customer base. This process
will be difficult to adjust for a while but these new concepts will
dominate the 2010-2020 business models.
Asian and Gulf countries are in the race too. From high profile
record-breaking mega developments of Dubai to car projects like the NANO
of India, the cheapest car ever designed for the affordability of a
billion new customers, some 43,000 big and small brands have hatched in
Asia during the last 5 years and getting some serious traction. India
will soon demonstrate a $10.00 laptop for the masses and China a series
of shockingly cheap highly engineered products. Overall India is poised
to lead the race. Despite, there are only few globally recognizable name
identities out of this entire region; the power of this mega image shift
is supporting their growth as these heavily populated regions are
providing the fuel.
Talk about more change, the White House is where a black family lives
now; Wall Street is where CEO's panhandle the poor of Main Street. The
echoes of O-B-A-M-A ring every hallway, Obama brand merchandise hit the
volume and meltdown turns into Niagara Falls, while the widely expected
notions of a turn around upon inauguration. "American know that our
economic recovery will take years -not months" President Obama said
according to Reuters.
The expected change, the constant breaking news of the financial
meltdown has now become background music to everyone's ears as now they
all stare at the huge, city-size craters in their backyards. Somehow the
new realities are now only to be found in billion and trillion dollar
issues while million-dollar-thinking-poor-millionaires just have drifted
away. With note printing at warp speed, under high secrecy a major
publication prepares the cover of The New Trillionaire. The other new
trends will emerge fast; if human toil really creates real wealth so
will the hard working poor nations be responsible to create the new
global wealth? Will Harvard MBAs have to become experts on
Micro-Lending? Will old business models be put aside till brand new
platforms emerge?
All during 2008, the power of media as a
new-inter-continental-multi-media-concoction has emerged as a new type
of centrality controlling the minds of the new world. The global
information flow is no longer like streams or rivers with dams and
canals; rather it's more like Noah's flood. Only the very lucky ones can
get
a boat ride, the rest simply drown. Every second, breaking news
interacts will billions of emails and creates it own tsunami making all
the traditional delivery mechanism obsolete and burying all the
advertising messages along with it.
The new-information-flooding is the new superpower; while no one really
controls it, the information is now like water that finds it own flow.
All the old delivery models are dead while new ones are not even
hatched. In this chaos brand new mass communication standards and great
methodologies will emerge. With hundred newspapers for sale in the US
alone, the newspapers will have to become 'paperless' online powerhouse
portals or else.
The 2010 will be a new landscape, as new corporate structures of newly
merged survivors will appear all over the globe. The advertising will
emerge in an entirely different form, more like a digital plug to be
attached to ringing cash registers as pay as you go services and sales
first and bill later type models will survive.
The ICANN's brand new domain name platform will very positively shake
the branding world on a global scale. The traditional costs and times to
build global image and unique name identities will be cut by up to 95%
in most applications. With one billion users on the Internet and one
billion plus electronic devices in
the hands of global customers the positioning of the right name
identities in the right applications will win the battles, and at times
instantly. The study by ABC Namebank on the new global trends points to
how new champions must capture the hundreds of deals now emerging on new
cyber-branding structures.
On the positive note, so where are these new champions, what are they up
to and when will they emerge with bold new faces to global customer
base? Currently they are on intense research and pre-launch activity,
the game is wide open, the race is global, the rules are
ultra-sophisticated, some are embracing the
hard facts, approaching it correctly to lead the charge as a phenomenal
new global cyber branding age cometh.
[Naseem
Javed is a widely recognized world-authority on corporate
nomenclature and global image issues. Author
of Naming for Power,
Naseem founded ABC Namebank some 30 years ago and introduced The Laws of
Corporate Naming in 80s and currently is lecturing on global cyber
branding and the new ICANN platform. His website is: www.abcnamebank.com.
He can be reached @ nj@njabc.com
.]
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