Building an image and making it stick

The increasing challenge for advertisers is to build new brands and keep established brands going in an environment where consumers can quickly and easily filter out ads. Advertisers must find new and creative ways of reaching their intended audience in order for a brand to succeed.

Global Brands
BusinessWeek/Interbrand rank the companies that best built their images -- and made them stick

Advertisers who want to reach the Bublitz family of Montgomery, Ohio, have to leap a lot of hurdles. Telemarketing? Forget it -- the family of five has Caller ID. The Internet? No way -- they long ago installed spam and pop-up ad blockers on their three home computers. Radio? Rudy Bublitz, 47, has noncommercial satellite radio in his car and in the home. Television? Not likely -- the family records its favorite shows on TiVo and skips most ads.

"The real beauty is that if we choose to shut advertising out, we can," Rudy says. "We call the shots with advertisers today."

The best brand builders are also intensely creative in getting their message out. Many of the biggest and most established brands, from Coke to Marlboro, achieved their global heft decades ago by helping to pioneer the 30-second TV commercial. But it's a different world now. The monolithic TV networks have splintered into scores of cable channels, and mass-market publications have given way to special-interest magazines aimed at smaller groups. Given that fragmentation, it's not surprising that there's a new generation of brands, including Amazon.com, eBay, and Starbucks, that have amassed huge global value with little traditional advertising. They've discovered new ways to captivate and intrigue consumers. Now the more mature brands are going to school on the achievements of the upstarts and adapting the new techniques for themselves.

So how do you build a brand in a world in which consumers are increasingly in control of the media? The brands that rose to the top of our ranking all had widely varied marketing arsenals and were able to unleash different campaigns for different consumers in varied media almost simultaneously. They wove messages over multiple media channels and blurred the lines between ads and entertainment. As a result, these brands can be found in a host of new venues: the Web, live events, cell phones, and handheld computers. An intrepid few have even infiltrated digital videorecorders, devices that are feared throughout the marketing world as the ultimate tool for enabling consumers to block unwanted TV ads.

Some marketers have worked to make their brand messages so enjoyable that consumers might see them as entertainment instead of an intrusion. When leading brands are seen on TV they're apt to have their own co-starring roles -- as No. 9 Toyota Motor Corp. did in reality show The Contender -- rather than just lending support during the commercial breaks. All are trying to create a stronger bond with the consumer. Take No. 41 Apple Computer Corp., which last fall launched a special iPod MP3 player in partnership with band U2. Not only did the "U2 iPod" say "U2" on the front and have band signatures etched into the back, but the band starred in a TV ad and buyers got $50 off a download of 400 U2 songs. No. 8 McDonald's Corp.'s sponsorship of a tour by R&B group Destiny's Child means that fans who want access to exclusive video and news content about the band have to click first on the company's Web site. "It's hard here to tell where the brand message ends and where the entertainment and content begins," says Ryan Barker, director of brand strategy at consultancy The Knowledge Group.