Jul 19, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Social Media
Procter & Gamble is a huge branded consumer business, but seems to be able to maintain the agility and innovation capability of an SME. Supermarket retailers have to be nervous when they display a determination to build a direct business model for their brands, and when they start talking about “qualified retailers” it is music to my ears, having struggled in an unforgiving Australian FMCG duopoly for years. It is the other side of the coin from retailers developing their own brands beyond Housebrand status, noted previously.
P&G tried with Amazon, and the effort had its challenges, so they are quietly widening the approach with this facebook collaboration, creating a new descriptor in the process, “f-commerce” and recruiting Wal-mart as a “qualified retailer” (not bad for a start)
This also ticks facebooks boxes, as it is a strategy to monetarise their huge base of connections to consumers, and sets them against Amazon in the e-fulfilment business.
Poor old Microsoft, increasingly it seems to have missed the boat. Just a decade ago the US government had them in court trying to break them up to give others a chance.
What’s the old saying about roosters and feather dusters?
Jul 18, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Strategy
There is a new boy on the block to match Colgate, P&G, and other international brand owners, but one who does not play fair, one who controls access to consumers, removing their options of choice. Tesco. A retailer with the clout of Tesco that comes from its scale, with its ability to determine which products consumers will see on shelf, is aiming to develop international housebrands in competition with its suppliers.
Some will see this as just commercial common sense, Tesco leveraging their hard won position with consumers, whilst others will see it as the death-nell of brands, something to be opposed by any means.
I suggest it is neither, but neither is it something in the middle, there are other dimensions to the decision that will determine the outcome:
- Will a retailer be able to develop the deep consumer understanding that feeds a sustainable marketing, brand and product development effort necessary to build a real brand as distinct from labels on shelf?
- When a consumer has a problem with a Tesco branded product, and Tesco fails to manage that problem in a satisfactory manner, will the consumer just move to an alternative product, or move to an alternative retailer?
- Will the presence of Tesco branded products on shelf in a category further remove the incentive for proprietary brands to invest in category growth, and will the further removal of that support damage category profitability for Tesco? This profitability squeeze appears to be happening currently in many categories being demolished by retailer housebrands, will it just get worse?
This development is a logical evolution of the path retailers have been travelling for some time, the only real question is weather evolution accepts the change in the model, or will the model, having evolved past the point of sustainability, now wither and die in the face of more effective competitive models.
Jul 14, 2011 | Branding, Marketing
Brands are not uniform things, they are an amalgam of all sorts of contributing factors, patterns of attraction, that together make up an experience.
People recognise and relate to brands in a very personal way, and in the age of net communication, the opportunity to build and leverage from the notion of brands as patterns of behaviour and preference is building daily. People have friends who are all different, but looking behind the people, there will usually be a few common denominators, education, interests, a particular point of view, something that binds them together that may not be immediately obvious.
The brands people choose to engage with are no different to the people they choose to engage with, they contain a pattern of characteristics that is attractive.
Jun 27, 2011 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing
How often have you seen assumptions, either made in the early stages of a project, or as a result of a long association with a product category blinding people to alternatives, gradually become accepted as “fact”?
I have seen it often, as has everyone who ever sought to overturn the status quo, these “factoids” rear their ugly heads to stymie innovation.
Many years ago, when flavored milk was all packed in cartons that cost a few cents each, it was an accepted “factoid” that consumers would not pay extra for different packaging that added to the cost of the product. It was a “fact” that plastic bottles with a resealable screw cap that added 25 cents to the cost , for less product, held no attraction to consumers, a “fact” confirmed by market research. At the time, whilst pretty obvious that the research was flawed by asking consumers questions about something they had not seen, the institutional forces against any innovation were strong.
However, we launched a product, “Dare” flavored milk that delivered less product in a more expensive, more user friendly and attractive package, and consumers changed their behavior overnight, and the product was not only a success, but it changed the marketing landscape of flavored milk overnight, and 20 years later it is still on the market.
So much for the so called facts.
Jun 26, 2011 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Sales, Social Media, Strategy
The future of produce marketing in Australia is fraught with difficulties that many who just buy their produce in the supermarket will never think about.
The dominance of the chain supermarkets, lack of innovation, fragile investment outlook, environmental concerns, regulatory inconsistency and political blather in place of certainty coming from any philosophic foundation, an ageing workforce, trade barriers, the list goes on.
The report below was commissioned in an effort to put some framework around the marketing of produce in Australia, and to take lessons from what was happening elsewhere, and whilst it is a relative scratch at the surface, it highlights the challenges. Download it, and let me know what you think, what have I missed, where it could be improved. Its free to download, but I would appreciate you letting me know by commenting.
Embracing Innovative Marketing & Promotional Methods
May 29, 2011 | Branding, Personal Rant
Why does the government set out to create conflict? Is it to distract attention? The current “debate” on cigarette packaging is a silly nonsense, a politically inspired furphy.
Obviously it is in the community’s interest to reduce smoking rates, smoking kills, and obviously the cigarette companies will protect their investment in a legal product, immoral as that may seem to some.
Philosophically, I am alarmed at the proposal to retrospectively trash the investment in brands made over a long time by sellers of the noxious weed, it has been legal to promote their products by any means allowed by the moving legislative goalposts , just very difficult for the last few years. Why is it different to the announcement by the NSW Premier that retrospectively he will reduce the feed in rate for solar panels? Both are an injustice, no matter how ill advised the original circumstances.
In the event that this legislation passes, we deserve to pay huge amounts of damages to the fag companies as compensation for their trashed brand equity. In an environment where business needs a rule of law as a basis for long term decision making, retrospectivity, no matter how superficially attractive, should be a no-no.
Why don’t they just double excise, and announce that in 12 months, it will be doubled again. That would do more to reduce smoking rates than plain packs, not open the IP compensation box, and it would be easy. It would also drag in a bit of short term revenue to pay the hospital bills of those few smokers left.
Perhaps it is because they do not want to be nasty to all those smoking voters, they would rather open the community to huge compensation payouts. Silly, silly people.
