For the business community, the digital age is the best age and the worst age. What impacts does the digital age bring to big and small companies? In the digital age of survival of the fittest, how should enterprises establish and build their brands? On March 2, 2017, Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Marketing Area Chair at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp came to the Join Forum and gave a lecture titled "Global Brand Building in the Digital Age".

Prof. Steenkamp’s works include Private Label Strategy: How to Beat the Store Brand Challenge and Brand Breakout: How Emerging Market Brands Will Go Global. His new book Global Brand Strategy: World-wise Marketing in the Age of Branding will be published soon. He can be called one of the most influential marketing scholars in the world.

"Big brands can really build a more powerful business empire in the digital age.” In China, competition for the rural e-commerce market between Ali and JD was an example. Through Internet communication and building of links such as delivery, e-commerce giants were able to deliver goods to remote mountainous areas. For big brands with worldwide reputation, consumers were more willing to make purchases out of admiration for their reputation through direct online purchases of overseas products; the communication dividend made it easier for famous enterprises’ brands to cash in; because of elimination of information asymmetry by Internet communication, local counterfeit products could even “advertise” for multinational enterprises instead.

In the digital age, consumer goods’ market potential gradually shifted to electronic terminals. The Internet’s unique marginal utility allowed big e-commerce brands to grow at exponential rates. Prof. Steenkamp compared the net sales revenue data of Walmart representing US traditional retail and Amazon representing electronic retail, and found Walmart’s total growth was 23% while Amazon’s growth reached a staggering 1451%. Amazon was not the only emerging brand. Prof. Steenkamp said that the digital age shaped big Chinese Internet brands familiar to everybody such as BAT and JD, and made overseas science and technology giants’ reputation spread far and wide. The combination of the online and offline become one of big brands’ most effective marketing means in the digital age.

In the mobile Internet age, big brands still had great difficulties in subversive innovation and could only adopt progressive innovation because enterprises needed to meet users’ demand faster than before, so some brands blindly catered to users. On the contrary, some small brands paid more attention to users’ future, tried to make breakthroughs from the flanks and realized overtaking around the curve, and even took advantage of niche markets’ development to quickly become global brands.

"The window of new entrants’ response in the digital age has shortened from several decades to one year or less. Global brands will suddenly emerge faster and spring up from unexpected directions. Existing brands must keep monitoring markets and respond quickly to emerging threats, which requires significant improvement of organizational agility. Besides, fast information flow, connectivity and market transparency make consistency of brands in different countries more important. Therefore, the advent of the digital age favors new brands more than existing global famous brands.”

Prof. Steenkamp said that apart from social media, small brands could seek cooperation in sales through big platforms. Big platforms shouldering the responsibility for infrastructural construction greatly lightened small brands’ burden of initial cost so that they could focus attention on core innovation. Such brand building through platforms was still an “inexpensive” choice.