BUILDING PAN-AFRICAN BRANDS

For decades, Coca-Cola and IBM were among the scant few globally-recognized brands. Forty years ago, there were only a handful of truly "global brands" and they were made up of only the biggest corporations:-Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, IBM, Shell. Then a rash of upstarts came along, such as Nike, Microsoft, Apple and Honda, and pushed their brand reputation further than their actual sales footprint. But now that barriers to international trade have come down and the Internet has helped small and mid-sized companies compete on the global stage, building a pan-African and an international brand is a realistic goal for more and more businesses."Only in the last 10 years has global business become the benchmark for how you do business these days," says Hayes Roth, chief marketing officer for Landor Associates, a strategic brand and design consultancy that has worked on international branding with such companies as BP, Panasonic and KFC. "Thanks to the Internet, it's hard to keep your brand just localized. Once you're on the Web, you're accessible pretty much anywhere in the world. It doesn't necessarily make you a global brand, but you have to be mindful of the implications.

In starting a new business or seeking to increase