We appreciate the power of brands. Recently I was given cause to wonder if the power of a particular brand may be a derivative of an even more powerful brand. Can a brand ´borrow´from, or piggyback on, the strength of another?
On our first day on our trip to Caracas, our host took my wife and me to a small shopping mall, and we saw this:
Now my first thought was that it was testimony to the power of the Blockbuster brand. But then I asked myself, ¨Why did they not translate ´block buster´into Spanish?¨ The reason is that the word communicates to Venezuelans, and even more powerfully, even to those who cannot speak English.
Later in the day we had lunch with some friends who are diplomats, and during our conversation they described English as ´the esperanto of the world´. (With apologies to the French and Chinese.)
So there is the brand of English, already so powerful in the Entertainments Industry. And a video hire company piggybacks on that, and keeps its international name as its international brand.
Are there other examples of piggybacking onto a powerful brand like English?
