Global Umbrella Brands: Understanding Brand America and Its Competitors

Abstract

Globally, individual companies offer their products and services competing against other individual companies. In fact, these firms compete as part of a larger network; a value chain or value network. However, more fundamental than the value chain is the economic system in which firms compete. In the West, each company competes within a basically free market economy. The field of competition they share carries with it a generalized understanding of the importance of customers and their needs, a view of competitors and the strategies needed to counter; as well as a code of behavior that identifies actions which are allowable and those which are prohibited: More specifically, this paper broadly examines the construct of "nation-brands" at the macro (nation-state) and micro (citizen/consumer) levels. Using the "classic JJ brand-life-cycle model along with the brand adoption process a framework for understanding global umbrella