In the midst of the current economic meltdown, western brands have started falling with domino effect. In the US alone, hundreds of world-class brands are being erased, from giant banking to mega manufacturing.

So far, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, some 73,000 stores have been closed. Overall a trillion-dollar worth of brand imagery that took decades of image-building, is being scrubbed out worldwide.

The sky-high brand evaluations, claiming values in tens of billion dollars, are just about irrelevant now. The customers now talk about their brand loyalty by stating the billions in bailouts given to their brands or by size of their bankruptcy.

In 2008, record-breaking losses of $30.1 trillion were added in market evaluations, according to Bloomberg. It is not just a tidy folder of time pulled from the Julian calendar, it’s rather a real basket case.

Something that started years ago will take years to sort out. But nevertheless it will create a forced change and alter the course of all aspects of our lives.

This direct hit of the financial meteor wiping out a generational thinking will create a new landscape with chasms and voids that will have to be filled by new image leaders and new type of brand champions.

The US once again has a great opportunity to fully demonstrate a grand scale nationwide rags-to-riches story. No other nation has ever achieved this level of proven mastery of grassroots entrepreneurialism. These turbulences will lead to some amazing new global-scale-cyber-models pointing to brand new style of delivery of goods and services.

There will be an explosion of change, from paperless newspapers, shopping-centrer-less shopping to office-less offices. Now it will be expressed more by cyber reach of customer base. This process will be difficult to adjust for a while but these new concepts will dominate the 2010-2020 business models.

Asian and Gulf countries are in the race too. From high profile record-breaking mega developments of Dubai to car projects like the NANO of India, the cheapest car ever designed, some 43,000 big and small brands have hatched in Asia during the last five years and getting some serious traction.

India will soon demonstrate a $10.00 laptop for the masses and China a series of shockingly cheap highly engineered products. There are only few globally recognisable name identities coming out of this entire region; yet the power of this mega image shift is supporting their growth as these heavily populated regions are providing the fuel.

Talk about more change, the Whitehouse is where a black family lives now; Wall Street is where CEO’s panhandle the poor of Main Street. The echoes of O-B-A-M-A ring every hallway, Obama brand merchandise hit the volume and meltdown turns into Niagara Falls.

“American know that our economic recovery will take years, not months” President Obama said at his inauguration ceremony.

The expected change has now become background music to everyone’s ears as now they all stare at the huge, city-size craters in their backyards as a result of financial meltdown and economic depression. Somehow the new realities are now only to be found in billion and trillion dollar issues while million-dollar-thinking-poor-millionaires just have drifted away. With note printing at warp speed, under high secrecy, a major publication prepares the cover of The New Trillionaire.

The other new trends will emerge fast; if human toil really creates real wealth so will the hard working poor nations be responsible to create the new global wealth? Will Harvard MBAs become experts on micro-lending? Will old business models be put aside till brand new platforms emerge?

In 2008, the power of media as a new-inter-continental-multi-media-concoction has emerged as a new type of centrality controlling the minds of the new world. The global information flow is no longer like streams or rivers with dams and canals; rather it’s more like Noah’s flood.

Only the very lucky ones can get a boat ride, the rest simply drown. Every second, breaking news interacts with billions of emails and creates it own tsunami making all the traditional delivery mechanism obsolete and burying all the advertising messages along with it.

The new-information-flooding is the new superpower; while no one really controls it, the information is like water that finds it own flow. All the old delivery models are dead while new ones are not even hatched. In this chaos, brand new mass communication standards and great methodologies will emerge. The newspapers will have to become ‘paperless’ online powerhouse portals.

The 2010 will be a new landscape, as new corporate structures of the survivors will appear all over the globe. The advertising will emerge in an entirely different form, more like a digital plug to be attached to ringing cash registers as pay as you go services and sales first and bill later type models will survive.

The traditional costs and times to build global image and unique name identities will be cut by up to 95 per cent in most applications. With one billion users on the Internet and one billion plus electronic devices in the hands of global customers, the positioning of the right name identities in the right applications will win the battles, and at times instantly.

On the positive note, so where are these new champions, what are they up to and when will they emerge with bold new faces to global customer base? Currently they are on intense research and pre-launch activity, the game is wide open, the race is global, the rules are ultra-sophisticated, some are embracing the hard facts, approaching it correctly to lead the charge as a phenomenal new global cyber branding age cometh.