7 Keys to Marketing Genius: Brands are Promises
The following is an excerpt from The 7 Keys to Marketing Genius by Michael Daehn
Brands are promises. The image presented by your brand promises to deliver on the commitments made by your marketing communications with consumers. Break your promises, don’t deliver on what you say you can do, and your image will be tarnished. Live up to, or better yet exceed, expectations and your relationship with customers will grow stronger.
Meeting time and convenience needs is a major benefit to most consumers. For this reason many brand promises are based on providing more time or convenience. More importantly, brands themselves meet time and convenience needs. When you look at an aisle of toothpaste boxes, you do not know which one will best meet your needs. If you see Brand X which you know and trust that says “whitens teeth better,” you can save time by grabbing that box of toothpaste and moving to the next item on your shopping list. But if there is a plain label brand that says it also will whiten teeth, do you try it? How do you know you can trust this product? You can take time to compare the labels and ingredients with the name brand. The only way you will know for sure is to take it home and try it. There is risk involved and potentially a lot of wasted time. It is safer, quicker, and more convenient to use the brand you already know and trust.
Recently people have become more willing to try non-branded items. Over time there has been an increased acceptance of non-branded items. However, this is usually done at the expense of the brands themselves. Non-branded items or brands distributed under the retailer’s name are often placed right next to the branded products on the shelves to gain credibility.
Do you remember the introduction of non-branded items to the supermarket? I remember a whole aisle of “generic” items packaged in plain black and white labels. You could buy a six-pack of white cans that had scrolled across the front in black letters “beer.” I enjoyed a large bag labeled simply “jellybeans” that had different sized jellybeans cast off from some candy factory as imperfect. If you are not old enough to remember the generic aisle, you might wonder where it went. Those items are still in the store, but the grocers wisely changed their strategy. Stores today have their own house brand names that usually include in the title select, choice, premium, or president.
Technically these products are no longer non-branded or generic. They carry the brand image of the store and rely on the trust the consumer has with the particular retailer. The reason for the shift is that plain generic products did not sell as well as those with at least a nominal amount of branding by carrying the name of the store. Brands are important because they are the guarantee and promise of the brand maker that the product is what it says it is.