Brands engraved in Stone.

VOL. 0060 – FLORIDA, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2025

Juan F. Arjona Harry

President & CEO Strategee   

Each time a Brand is born, the following question is asked: “How long the Brand will live?” There are multiple answers passing through the quality of Branding and Marketing deployed by the company. Usually these answers could help the longevity of the Brand. However there are other considerations that allow us to draw conclusions quite striking about the potential longevity of a brand.

Today we have a select group of brands that accumulate 100 or more years, as Gold Medal (with about 137 years), John Deere (with about 188 years), Banco de Bogotá (with about 155 years), Mercedes Benz (with about 141 years), Bayern Football Club (with about 125 years), Ford (about 122 years), Bavaria (over 130 years), and thus, a select group of brands already surpassed a century of existence, finding in them and the profile of its longevity distinguishable elements from the very category that we will review below.

Each brand represents one or more products that connect directly to human needs.

In this order of needs and based on Abraham Maslow's pyramid, basic physiological needs and the security and protection -and within-: food, clothing, transportation, insurance, health protection, housing and entertainment, create a baseline of manifestation and solution of needs to be maintained over time, even though some of the drivers of consumption have evolved in this century.

Without prejudice to that in this type of brands has been a process of Branding and Marketing exemplary, consistent, continuous-time (and the proof is that during the whole time of its existence, other competitors for some reason are no longer or have fallen defeated by the power of their marketing) some brands are located in categories that enjoy a very solid consumption platform, less volatile in terms of its continuous change of consumer insights and consumption triggers that other categories such as technology.

In this order of ideas, all developments that occur to meet these basic needs, taken to extremes (i.e., carried even to satisfy hedonistic pleasures), hold assets of consumption triggers, giving the categories a base of greatest potential for longevity of brands.

It's not a sine qua non, but it is undeniable that these categories enjoy addressing needs that are permanent in time and are more stable than the needs for affiliation and belonging, self-esteem, prestige, power and self-realization of the individual.

These brands that focus on these categories, may have an advantage in terms of developing themselves on more stable consumer platforms, so today we have this kind of brands that seem already engraved in stone.