Just read a great article about five best companies to work. Here are the text i get from Forbest.com. I hope someday i could work for these companies.
1. Dell Computer
Dell Computer (nasdaq: DELL - news - people ) is a great example of bold and daring marketing that has endured. When the computer industry was employing nothing but conventional wisdom and selling through complicated and profit-draining distribution channels, a 19-year-old University of Texas student named Michael Dell asked why PCs had to be distributed in this rigid, myopic fashion. He then decided to act in a truly contrarian way by taking his products directly to the customer, cutting out the expensive and unnecessary distribution, streamlining service and putting himself in direct touch with his customers.
The results today are stunning: With $31.2 billion in revenue over the last four quarters, 34,800 employees worldwide and a reputation for bringing its product directly to the user at a lower cost, Dell has revolutionized the computer industry. In marketing, nothing is more important than vision. Imagine what it will look like when it's done, stay on strategy and you can get there. Michael Dell had this to say about being picked No. 1: "Our original vision at Dell was to work directly with customers to provide them with the latest computing technology, custom built to suit their needs, and backed by the best service and support in the industry. That original vision hasn't changed and has become the foundation of our success." Dell is clearly a guy who developed his strategy, got it right and stuck with it--a lesson for us all.
2. Sony
Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) is the kind of company that constantly launches so many great products that engineers and designers for competing companies must get little rest at night; they must wonder exhaustedly how to keep up. Since 1946, when Masaru Ibuka started Sony, it has rocketed into electronics and entertainment consumers' minds as the brand. Beginning right after the end of the war as it did, one of Sony's founding purposes was "to reconstruct Japan and to elevate the nation's culture." It's no small wonder that, with such lofty original goals, Sony has become an iconoclastic global brand.
When Japan was known mainly for ludicrously arcane instruction manuals for their cheap electronics products, Morita came along and purposely decided to change that. Until his death, he personally supervised and tested each and every Sony product, because if he didn't want the product in his home or to use it personally, then it wouldn't be a Sony product at all. Conceiving of many of these superior products, such as the VCR--one of the inventions to change our lives--and the Walkman, which was invented so that he could listen to his classical music at ear-splitting volume without disturbing his wife, Morita was one of the first to consider ergonomic design. The Sony design of things, such as the remote control that fits contentedly into the palm of the hand, is an early example of this focus.
Morita's genius was twofold: He wanted Sony products to be of the highest quality as well as beautiful; he was first in the electronics industry in this regard. Sony's figures for the year ended March 31, 2002, include: 7.578 trillion yen ($6.11 billion) in sales and 134.6 billion yen ($1.08 billion) in operating income. According to Tim Munoz, a partner at San Francisco-based branding-and-strategy consulting firm Prophet, "Sony is consistently introducing products that delight people, capturing their imaginations. They don't have to have a bunch of marketing people sit in a room crafting an image; the people in the lab are creating magic products."
"Sony's products stop you in your tracks," says Munoz. "The brand acquires an almost mystical quality." If a company can consistently create products such as this, which generate phenomena--and Sony does--it can effectively position itself accordingly as "the best" and eliminate competition. Or at least keep them awake at night.
3. Harley-Davidson
"Daring" is how Doug Spong of Carmichael Lynch Spong Public Relations describes the marketing style of Harley-Davidson (nyse: HDI - news - people ). Spong, who serves H-D as a client, goes on to say that Harley's brand "has as much relevance as some 100 years ago when the three Harley brothers and the Davidson boy started the company." The numbers for 2001 are impressive: $438 million in profit (up 25.9%) on $3.4 billion in sales (up 15.7%) and a share price increase of almost 40%.
The company had a very bumpy ride a few decades back and then engineered a startling turnaround. "In the case of Harley, the brand almost went away," Spong says. "The Japanese competitors were really forcing [it] to struggle." H-D was able to reverse course rapidly by focusing "on [its] core customer base while simultaneously expanding [its] appeal to an unexpected market: CEOs, lawyers, doctors and professionals," Spong says. The Harley-Davidson executives and marketing minds have "a very good idea of what their brand isn't, more than what it is," Spong adds. "Harley resonates in the heart, soul and mind of its customer. It's a unique bike--it's a Harley!"
4. Virgin
Virgin's Richard Branson has long been considered an entrepreneurial genius. Here's a guy who's hammered together an empire spanning retailing, records, entertainment, soft drinks and alcoholic beverages, online car sales, airlines, travel, resorts, health care, trains, limousines, movie theaters, financial services, mobile phones, Internet service, publishing, radio stations, utilities, wines, mortgages and bridal stores. Branson himself has to venture a guess as to how many companies he owns, estimating 250--a good many of which are privately held. "The phenomenon at work at Virgin is the transition of the consumer perception of brands. Virgin doesn't think about what products [it makes], but how [its] products make people feel," says Patrick Palmer, chief strategic officer at Euro RSCG Tatham Partners in Chicago.
Branson's single-minded, relentless pursuit of infinitely expanding his Virgin brands is admirable. After starting Virgin as a student magazine and a small mail-order record company, Branson has built an enormous and diverse set of brands. Palmer tells a story about flying Virgin and catching sight of some very nifty, ornate salt-and-pepper shakers that "were just begging to be stolen." When a woman sitting alongside him lifted them up, on the bottom of each shaker was engraved "Pinched from Virgin." "It's just this kind of cheeky, fun and irreverent attitude that makes people feel good about Virgin's brand," Palmer says. One of Palmer's favorite concepts is "brand envelopes," which he describes by pointing out: "What's inside doesn't matter; it's what's around the envelope itself that matters. Consumers can step into the brand." Virgin has a very large brand envelope, indeed.
5. Southwest Airlines And EasyJet
Both Southwest Airlines (nyse: LUV - news - people ) and EasyJet were chosen on the weight of their performance in an incredibly challenging industry. EasyJet, while not as well-known in the U.S., is very much changing the competitive landscape for airlines in Europe and deserves inclusion on the basis of its competitive activities against much bigger airlines, including British Airways (nyse: BAB - news - people ).
Southwest Airlines' Herb Kelleher is a legend to many airline and business people. Many airline executives don't like him too much, because he has forced them to recognize the customer more, loosen up and look differently at revenue-per-passenger-mile numbers from which they operate. Kelleher, still the motorcycle-riding chairman of Southwest, got together with Rollin King some 30 years ago and decided that if an airline got its passengers to the destination on time for the most economical fare and "made darn sure they had a good time doing it," people would fly that airline.
Were they ever right. The most important part of it, the part that was truly differentiating marketing in the airline industry, was the fun part. This was the clearly special ingredient in a business that almost never communicated any fun to its customers. Southwest is now the fourth-largest airline in the U.S. and flies more than 64 million passengers per year to 58 cities. In 2001, Southwest posted its 29th consecutive yearly profit (remarkable for the airline industry) and had $511 million in net income on $5.6 billion in operating revenue.
Stelios Hajo-Ioannou, the gregarious and flamboyant founder and non-executive chairman of EasyJet, was to a large degree inspired by Herb Kelleher, according to John Quelch, a professor of marketing at Harvard University and a non-executive board member of EasyJet. Hajo-Ioannou, who started EasyJet in 1995 when he was 28, also emulated Virgin's Richard Branson. While borrowing from Kelleher on the airline side and Branson on the multiple-brand development side, Hajo-Ioannou has certainly replicated the best marketing thinkers and differentiators in their areas.
Hajo-Ioannou has since started EasyGroup, the parent of other "easy" businesses such as EasyInternetCafe (21 stores in 8 countries within two years, more than 60 shops now); EasyCar.com (car rental); EasyMoney (online MasterCard, likely expanding into further financial services); and EasyValue (online site for shopping comparison). When asked if Hajo-Ioannou might venture as far and wide as Branson into as many different businesses, Quelch points out that "Virgin has put [its] name on an incredibly wide set of products and services, and [EasyGroup] won't be getting into as wide an offering.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/2002/08/01/0801marketers.html
It's in 2002, i think the 2012 versio is a little bit different.
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