South Africa’s own Capitec bank named as one of the world’s top global ‘Great brands of tomorrow’

Posted on 11. Mar, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry in Branding

Capitec doing damn well

Lately we’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Capitec bank. And it seems like their investment in innovative thinking is paying off, ’cause Capitec have been named, along with 26 other global brands like Facebook, Uniqlo, Apple and Hyundai, as one of the global ‘great brands of tomorrow’ by Swiss-based financial group Credit Suisse.

Capitec is the only African brand to crack the list.

According to the Credit Suisse document on the list:

Using our framework and global network of analysts, we identified 27 Great Brands of Tomorrow at various stages of development that we believe will significantly outperform the market over the next three to five years as they build and leverage brand equity to grow in size, scale, and profitability.

Although we’ve never been huge fans of brand lists and stuff like that [after all Toyota was ranked 8th best brand in the world last year] it’s still a great confidence booster for Capitec and South Africa to have at least one brand being recognised as being innovative and having good future prospects by an independent research institute.

Here’s a link to the full Credit Suisse report on 27 Great Brands of Tomorrow (11mb pdf!)

Interesting points highlighted in the research from Credit Suisse:

Three Core Sources of Brand Value
While there are many great brands that leverage a wide variety of strengths and attributes, as previously mentioned, we believe there are three core sources of brand value: innovation, aspiration, and scale. It is from these core sources that great brand companies create and leverage their brands via superb marketing, innovative new products, strong leadership, and a reputation for quality.
Innovation
These brands innovate continuously and more rapidly than competitors, in product development or in business processes. Intel introduced new chips every two years instead of the traditional four years. Southwest continues to find ways to reduce gate turn-around time, through boarding procedures and limiting food on flights to simplify clean-up and loading. L’Oreal invests more than double in R&D as a percentage of sales than competitor Revlon.
Aspiration
Probably the most obvious of the branding success stories, these brands use emotion, associations, and personality to grow their strength with customers. LVMH brings to mind unsurpassed luxury, creativity, and craftsmanship. Budweiser connotes qualities such as American, masculine, humorous, sports, and casual. These brand intangibles can also be evident in a distinctive corporate culture and in attracting and retaining employees. Google’s nontraditional workplace environment springs to mind as does Nike’s headquarters with its state-of-the-art gym and buildings named after famous athletes.

Scale
These brands leverage their power over suppliers or distributors or through an installed base to maintain their brand positioning and competitive advantage. Toyota rings inventory carrying cost savings from its suppliers. Coke controls its bottlers, which sell and distribute its product. Facebook grows organically by leveraging the connections of its members. Microsoft benefits from people sharing files and needing to have the same software programs to do so.