An overview of German management from ExecutivePlanet.com offers some insight into why Germany is a leader in brand quality: “The German manager concentrates intensely on two objectives: product quality and product service. … The watchwords for most German managers and companies are quality, responsiveness, dedication, and follow-up… A German manager believes deeply that a good-quality production line and a good-quality product will do more for the bottom line than anything else.”

While German companies engage in competition, they seem to have the greater good in mind. Makers of German brands are less interested in competing on price and more focused on making products of superior quality. German companies tend to strictly adhere to government standards and cooperate rather than conflict with government.

On the downside, large German companies can be, at times, lumbering. They “do not move as quickly today as many American firms,” admits Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Jeffrey Fear, author of Organizing Control, a book about German corporate management. But Fear, interviewed in 2005 by HBS, says that these larger companies are countered by “thousands of owner-entrepreneur controlled Mittelstand (small and medium-sized firms) that remain very entrepreneurial, though in a quiet fashion. Germany remains an export leader today because of those secretive firms.”

Germany’s brand exports have a long, celebrated history of excellence, regardless of industry segment. The country’s automobile brands, of course, are the ones consumers most closely associate with the country’s branding acumen.

BMW, a maker of premium automobiles, is one such revered brand. Founded in 1917 in Munich, Germany as “Bavarian Motor Works,” BMW produced aircraft engines during World War I, then built motorcylces in 1923 and went on to make cars in 1928.

In the past decade, BMW has been recognized as much for its innovative, quality marketing as for its high-performance cars. In the early 2000s, BMW started its own film division, creating high-production-value, short entertaining movies used to promote the company’s cars. More recently, BMW launched a somewhat controversial viral marketing campaign centered around a fictional Bavarian town that supposedly wanted to introduce a new BMW series. The company went so far as to fake a website for the town, refusing for a time to acknowledge that BMW was behind the prank.

BMW’s compatriot Porsche, long known for building luxury sports cars, took a calculated risk in the late 1990s by introducing Cayenne, an SUV model largely designed for the American market. Equally unusual, Porsche decided to build the Cayenne at a plant located within Germany, despite the fact that other auto manufacturers were making deliberate efforts to build within or closer to the United States.

Barry Silverstein has been a frequent brandchannel contributor since 2007. He has thirty years of advertising and marketing experience and is currently a freelance writer and marketing consultant. He founded and ran his own direct marketing agency and held executive positions with Epsilon, a leading database marketing firm and Arnold, a major ad agency. Silverstein is the author of three marketing books, including the McGraw-Hill book, The Breakaway Brand, which he co-authored with Arnold CEO Fran Kelly.