Pakistan's top brands: Strengths, weakness and challenges.

Byline: NAZIR AHMED SHAIKH

Pakistan has a rich and diverse market for brands, which reflects in its leading brands. It has flourishing business communities and several homegrown brands that have made a name for themselves both domestically and internationally. These brands represent different industries, such as textiles, food, and electronics, among others. While there are some challenges that these brands face, there are also many good prospects too; that they can take advantage of to expand their businesses.

Thousands of Pakistani brands; however appending below are a few prominent ones:

PSO, Engro, Dawlance, National foods, Nestle, Shan Food, Khaadi, Gul Ahmed, Coca Cola, Servis, PepsiCo, Unilever, Super Asia, Dalda Food, KandN, Mitchells, Murree Brewery, Packages and PEL etc.

These are just a few examples of leading Pakistani consumer brands. These companies have their own strengths and weaknesses. While there are some challenges that these brands face, there are also many prospects that they can take advantage of to expand their businesses.

Recently Arora magazine conducted a survey with leading 100 heads of agencies and corporate organizations and asked them to name two Pakistani brands they consider the most iconic. Twenty-four percent of the respondents were named Shan, followed by Khaadi and Rooh Afza (21% each), Tapal (19%) and Dalda and Pakola (10% each). (Other popular brands included Coke Studio, HBL, MoltyFoam, National Foods and Sooper).

With the exception of Khaadi, all these brands are FMCGs. And except for Shan and Khaadi (they were established in 1981 and 1998 respectively), they have been around for as long as Pakistan has existed, give or take a few years. Rooh Afza was established before Partition, Tapal and Dalda in 1947 and Pakola in 1950 followed by Dalda in 1952. The fact that these six are among Pakistan's oldest brands may have to do with their popularity. The survey reveals the two brands that have the potential to be iconic in the future are Khaadi led with 14% of the 'votes' followed by Shan and Daraz with 13% each and whereas Bykea and PSL have 8% each.

Several advertising and marketing professionals were not surprised that no brand emerged as a 'big winner' and attributed this to a lack of consistency in their messaging. Suffice it to say that even the people who were optimistic about what makes our advertising distinctive were rather critical at times, and responses ranged from positive to plain negative...