China currently doesn't have any well-known auto brands in the global market, and great efforts are needed for Chinese auto makers to build successful global brands, a US branding expert said Tuesday.

"Up until now, Chinese car manufacturers have not tried to create a global auto brand (not counting selling products in third world countries). Their efforts have been aimed at building domestic demand and sales," Scott Markman, president of the Chicago-based branding and advertising agency Monogram Group, told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

"The art and science of brand building has not been well understood within many Chinese manufacturing companies up until now ... But that is changing as ambitions have been raised and more Chinese students are coming to America to study marketing and brands," he said.

Markman praised the Chinese government for increasingly making building global brands a priority as the next step in making China a global player.

"This new focus will inevitably come to the leaders of China's car companies as they pursue the path of brand building worldwide. But just the way manufacturing cars is among the most complex and difficult processes in all of industrial mass production, so is building a global brand for a car company," he said.

As a seasoned branding professional, Markman advised the heads of China's car companies to immediately emulate the best practices of the global car companies from the United States, Japan, Germany and South Korea.

He said that success would require significant capital investment, long-term planning and commitments, advice from outside consultants, carefully researching consumer insights in other markets and a different approach to contracts and business relationships, among other things.

The good news is Chinese car manufacturers get to start with a clean slate, he said. They may start inventing themselves from day one and design every aspect of the brand and thus try to be successful on the global stage, the expert said.

As for the brand building of American cars, Markman said, "American car companies understood at the heart of building any successful brand was a combination of making a good product and standing behind it, which created deep and lasting familiarity and trust in the brand with consumers. Also establishing a distribution network of local dealers was key to their success, so they invested heavily in those dealer relationships and had those dealers do the same with their local customers."

According to Markman, American car companies were among the first large corporations to invest heavily in product design, advertising and promotion. However, he said that recently car companies have been too short term in their planning.

He said that US car companies spent billions of dollars every year to convey their message, investing in every form of marketing and promotion.

Markman emphasized that this was done not only at the national and local levels across the United States, but also in key markets around the world.

"Competing in America is not just about competing in America ...it is fought on the world stage all the time, which impacts US consumers," Markman said.

He added that US car companies also invest heavily in research and development and product design to develop the next generation of products.

"It's not just the product ...it's everything around the product that makes the brand as well," the expert said.

(Xinhua News Agency August 25, 2010)