Overview

Until recently global brands have been seen as licence to print money. With the right label and generous PR budget, sugary lemonades, greasy meat buns, tee-shirts or sports shoes could be sold for a multiple of the original manufacturing costs to an ever growing number of credulous, happy and somewhat simpleminded consumers.

Yet quite a few of the world's most celebrated brands face unforeseen difficulties, which seem unrelated to direct management mistakes or largely ineffective boycott calls: McDonald's, Coke, Disney and the U.S. car makers are all struggling with reduced sales and slimmed margins.

The most prominent American brands stood for both the fear and the promise of a homogenised global way of life along U.S. patterns, leveling national tastes and cultural preferences towards the smallest common denominator of mankind.

For backward industrial, many developing and former Communist countries, these brands surely offered progress in terms of reliable qualities, services and the notion to participate in the American way of life: Even the concept to eat, drink, make and to enjoy any product at any moment was seen as liberating.

Once however, the memory of scarcities was overcome, discretionary incomes increased and a basic familiarity with the U.S. way of life and consumption was established, the novelty value and compulsive attractivity of U.S. mass brands began to decline.

Rather than striving for uniformity, consumers recently begin to opt for greater freedom of choice and ever-greater diversity and product segmentation to express their personal likes and individuality, including a revival...