'You make products, people buy brands'
02.09.08
You make products or provide a service, but people buy brands. During a conversation over the weekend the sentence you have just read was uttered and probably never a truer word was spoken.
A brand is such a powerful asset to any organisation or service that wants to be successful. People feel comfortable with brands, they give people reassurance and make them feel socially acceptable.
If you have 2 products or services of exactly the same quality and price, the preferred brand will win out in the end. Even if the preferred brand or product is slighly higher in price or slightly inferior in terms of overall performance it will still win out.
This is all down to how branding works. For instance when you hear the word Nike, what do you think??? Immediately 'Just Do It' springs to mind and the Nike tick. Then there is the undoubted association with sports. Then you might think of Tiger Woods, Roger Federer etc. This isn't a concious decision, it's just successful branding.
One of the best examples of the power of branding is the Pepsi challenge. In case you are unaware of this challenge, it involved blindfolded participants tasting a sample of coke and a sample of pepsi and then choosing which was their favourite.
These adverts showed that on taste alone, Pepsi was undoubtedly more popular. Pepsi thought however that regardless of how their product tasted, people would still buy more coke, and they were right.
Coke then thought, Pepsi does taste better, let's make a new product that tastes more like Pepsi. Taste testers confirmed the product tasted better but consumers demanded 'old' coke, the brand they had come to trust.
A neuroscientist at Baylor College, Read Montague, then went one step further. He repeated the experiment whilst monitoring brain activity. Once again blindfolded and on taste alone Pepsi won out. However when the participants were told which products they were tasting, they overwhelmingly preferred coke. Remarkably the brand associations with Coke actually shaped their preferences.
The message from all of this is that if you don't get your branding correct, it won't necessarily stop a successful product or service, but it will hinder it. Never underestimate the power of branding!
