Shizuka Arakawa's graceful spins and spirals enthralled a nation as she won Japan the gold medal in women's figure skating at the Winter Olympics. But few would have cheered more loudly than Tokyo rice producer Toyorice Co., which became flooded with orders thanks to Arakawa's appearances in TV commercials for its Kinmemai golden sprouted rice.
A fortuitous combination of sporting and business success, Toyorice should benefit from its celebrity endorsement as long as Arakawa's fame endures. But while Japan also boasts the world's baseball champion and its second-biggest economy, the nation and Asia as a whole are still minnows in branding terms compared with the West's brand behemoths.
In BusinessWeek magazine's 2005 survey of top global brands, Toyota was the only Asian company to crack the top 10, while only two others -- Honda and Samsung -- made the top 20. Despite having two-thirds of the world's population and a quarter of its wealth, Asia is punching well below its weight in this class of economic performance -- a serious issue when considering that brands are estimated to account for 37 percent of average market capitalization.