Trademarks, trade names and brands as a measure of local, regional and global competition

Abstract

Forming a competitive strategy and attaining a strategic position at both country and firm level are closely related to branding. At the country level institutional fostering of selected products can be made using different strategies for promotion of local and international brands produced in the country. Effectiveness of country’s positioning efforts depends on wise selection of brands for promotion and on applying different positioning strategies depending on categories of brands. Magnitude of brand equity of country’s products largely affects nation brand value and country’s living standards; consequently this factor is important for ensuring rapid development of the country. The paper suggests a novel approach for two-dimensional disaggregation of products into categories depending on the shelf-life period of products and their perishability, and on their geographical distribution. The categories of products represent their shelf-life extending from perishable products to long shelf-life industrial products, and their geographical distribution: domestic, regional and global. Brands are analysed using in the transition markets of the Eastern Europe the twodimensional framework. It is demonstrated that most of local brands in the region belong to the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) category, which is not a high value-adding, thus is not generating substantial sales cash flows. A number of industrial brands is scarce, and marketing decisions in countries of the Eastern Europe for positioning brands of this category are made mostly by foreign investors.