Warren Buffett on Heinz

"If you own great brands and you take care of them, they're terrific assets."

(City A.M. this morning)

China buys into British brands

The largest foreign acquisition by a Chinese food group was announced last week. State-owned Bright Foods, based in Shanghai, took a controlling stake (60%) in the Weetabix Food Company (brands include Alpen, Weetabix and Ready Brek). Who will be next?

Let's stay in for a Chinese

WARC News are reporting this morning on the improving quality of goods and services from Chinese brands.

It goes on to highlight the pressure being put on 'foreign brands' in China, helped by the country's perceived success in hosting global events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai Expo of 2010, encouraging higher-income consumers to "buy China".

I wrote about this in a previous post and thought then: what an interesting reverse development: global events leading to local brand growth, but then local brands becoming the new global brands?

Certainly a challenge for IPA agencies and our trade mission to Beijing in October.

Globally sociable

I was reading a piece in WARC News this morning about the world's top brands now using at least one social media channel as a key part of their marketing portfolios.

Burson-Marsteller have updated a study on the Fortune Global 100 brands' use of microblogs such as Twitter, social networks including Facebook and video-sharing platforms like YouTube and corporate blogs - which showed the slowest rates of growth of all of the social media channels covered.

Overall, 84% of the companies surveyed now use at least one of these channels, which is up 5% year-on-year. The equivalent figure in Asia was up 17% but no significant movement up or down in Europe. That's not so surprising given European brands' early adoption of social media marketing and brands such as China Mobile tweeting to catch up!