The New Emerging Market Multinationals: Four Strategies for Disrupting Markets and Building Brands

6Building Perceptions of High Quality, Leadership, and Trust

As Chapter 4 pointed out, we strongly believe that having perceptions of high quality, industry leadership, and trust and confidence are much more important to brand strength than high levels of awareness or an attractive visual identity. Most of the EMNCs in our sample have low levels of brand awareness, made worse by negative country-of-origin imagery for most of them. A 2011 survey by GfK found that only one-third of vehicle buyers in the United States are willing to even consider Indian and Chinese auto manufacturers, versus 95 percent consideration for U.S. manufacturers, with poor (and slow-to-change) quality perceptions playing a major role.¹ Thus, it is not surprising that many ...