Investigating the Link between Supply Chain Performance and Brand Performance

Supply Chain Management has in today’s world become irreplaceable in business. The performance of a firm’s supply chain greatly affects availability of goods and services and can either push up or bring down a firm as a whole. This paper looks at trying to understand whether supply chain and brand performance can be linked and whether the information gained could be used to enhance perceived value. This was carried out through the analysis of the brand rankings and supply chain rankings as a measure of the brand performance and supply chain performance respectively of fourteen global brands. Secondary research was used to co-relate deviations or parallels between the rankings which were taken from AMR/Gartner Research Top 25 Supply Chains reports and the Milward Brown Optimor reports from 2007 to 2013. Other sources from publications, EBSCO, corporate websites, industry publications etc were extensively studied to understand reasons for changes in performance. It was found that eight of the fourteen organizations had both the rankings moving in tandem. In the rest, the rankings were either divergent or didn’t show any relationship.