Comment: A true brand is more than a fascia

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Many aspire to be a truly successful brand but very few succeed.

Apple has just become the world’s highest ever valued company. Meanwhile, Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, has lowered its global expansion plans, acknowledging “wonky” stores in China and flaky pricing in Brazil, whilst denying dodgy practices in Mexico.

Over the last two years, Apple and Walmart have seen a marked divergence in corporate fortunes.

In January 2010, they both enjoyed market capitalisations of around $200bn; since then, Apple has grown by more than threefold but Walmart by just 20% (on August 23 Apple stood at $620bn and Walmart $242bn).

The index of the top 20 US companies by market cap, showing Walmart in fourth place, also includes three of its FMCG suppliers – Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble. However, there is no other retailer.

But then, of course, there is. Apple, the phenomenal number one stock, not only tops the top 20 by a mile but it bridges that historically wide divide between retailing and consumer goods. The gatekeeper to that bridge is called “brand”.

The difference between brands, fascias and labels is a frequent topic of these columns. The latter two always aspire to the former, but they often delude themselves over accession, believing – mistakenly – that logos and slogans alone serve as passports to genuine brand status.

Mono-brand retail success stories are at once the most identifiable and the most international: Ikea and H&M being classic examples (there are some excellent non-Swedish ones too).

These retailers are brands in anyone’s definition. On the other hand, multi-brand retailers – supermarkets and department stores, for example – find it harder to replicate their domestic success abroad than do their major suppliers. So can these retailers really be called brands at all, notwithstanding their innovative private-label programmes?

Selfridges, the self-proclaimed ‘House of Brands’, is an iconic, world-famous store. But it is the luxury brands, the designer collections and the perfume houses that have set up their stalls under its bricks-and-mortar umbrella – and under those of its counterparts in every major city around the world – that own a proven global franchise, not Selfridges or its peers per se.

Similarly, the global, eponymous, fascia-planting exercises of Walmart, Carrefour and Tesco have all proved troublesome. It’s interesting to note that the more anonymous moves of Casino and Auchan, happier to trade under the identities of their local partners (in Brazil and China for example) than to proselytise local consumers under foreign banners, seem to reap better rewards.

Procter & Gamble, like all major FMCG companies, is a multi-brand operator par excellence. But unlike its retail customers, it doesn’t proclaim its own corporate brand to end users. It is one of the world’s biggest consumer goods companies, yet millions of consumers don’t even know its name – despite buying Pampers, Ariel, Crest et al every day.

Maybe this is all about to change. P&G’s triumphant twitters and TV commercials around the Olympics are spreading its corporate name to a much wider consumer audience; one that’s tuned into an omnichannel world in which the retail brand is no longer simply the name above the door.