Brands associated with high quality make the most inroads among consumers around the world, according to a paper published in the Journal of International Business Studies in January 2003. “How Perceived Brand Globalness Creates Brand Value” presents research that measured, in the United States and Korea, how a brand's perception as “global” affects customers' inclination to buy. Co-author Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp, a professor of marketing and international marketing research at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, summarizes the findings, “If a brand is perceived to be global, that creates value in the mind of consumers. Most of the value creation is through the fact that consumers ascribe products that are global to be of good quality.”A second pathway is through the prestige that accompanies a global brand. But quality dominates, representing more than 90% of the increased desirability of global brands among the 247 Americans and 370 Koreans surveyed. Prestige, adds co-author Rajeev Batra, S.S. Kresge Professor of Marketing at the University of Michigan Business School, can be transient. “When [global brands] are seen as novel, they may have high prestige, but when that novelty goes away, the prestige goes down.
