When Does It Pay off to Link a Brand Name to a Country?

The main contention of this paper is that branding and market communication in international markets need to be considered from more than the "traditional" culture-and-scale economies trade off perspective. This study presents a typology of four different branding categories based on the firm's international marketing capabilities and the globality of the industry: local brander, multidomestic brander, export brander, and global brander. Four case studies from Norway, representing each of the above categories of firms, are defined in what concerns the decision-making process involving the headquarters, the subsidiary or the local distributor, and the advertising agency; the information behaviour and the end result shows the degree of standardization of different elements of the branding and the market communication strategy.