They are the common currency of the global market, the instantly recognized ideograms of a universal language, ubiquitous products so familiar that they arouse consumer's appetites everywhere.

Nearly everyone can name a few. When Landor Associates, a San Francisco design consulting firm, asked 10,000 people in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan to rate 6,000 different brands, their findings were predictable. The Top 10: Coca-Cola, Sony, Mercedes-Benz, Kodak, Disney, Nestle, Toyota, McDonald's, IBM and Pepsi-Cola.

It is not surprising that the largest product category is food and soft drinks, or that most of the others are products of daily use. Nor is it surprising that 6 out of 10 are American; after all, the U.S. developed the first mass-consumer culture and has been exporting it for a long time. Forty years ago, Europeans were already complaining about "Coca-colonization." Today Coke earns more money in Japan than at home in the U.S.

In the world of brand names, familiarity breeds content. If a product is well known, people tend to think well of the company that makes it. Thus in a recent survey, Mercedes, Nestle and IBM all turn up among the companies most esteemed by European business executives, while Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are among the 10 "most admired" U.S. companies in a similar corporate beauty contest conducted annually in the U.S. by FORTUNE, a sister publication of TIME.

A well-known brand is thus a marketing asset. For example, in recent takeover bids, consumer-goods companies have paid premium prices for famous brands like Nabisco biscuits and Kraft cheese. Yet David Aaker, a professor of marketing at the University of California, Berkeley, is concerned that some companies, instead of nurturing their brands, damage them by price cutting or by trying to stretch them to unrelated products, as Levi's did in selling men's suits.

In the world of marketing, differences of taste and culture will not disappear, but any airport duty-free shop demonstrates that a growing number of products are acceptable to consumers everywhere. Something like a global youth culture already exists. With the French eating hamburgers and the Japanese celebrating the instant-coffee ceremony, who knows how far it will go?