Melbourne Herald Sun, 22 May 2010
That great ad man (long gone before us), David Ogilvy used to preach a major commandment for his agency. “I always use my clients’ products. This is not toadyism, but elementary good manners.”
His elegant words can be borne by all of us in business and marketing and advertising. In fact I would expand on them. I always use branded products. Because without branding, our clients would crumble and we’d be left cold on the streets.
I see advertising in two streams: bulk and brand.
Bulk marketing is what store chains and supermarkets do when they are promoting a sale. All the products are selected on the lowest price, often as not the stores’ own house brands. The product’s name or brand does not matter, just the price, so the cheapest wins.
The problem with this is it’s a race to the bottom. The manufacturer or importer ends up with a tiny profit mark-up, if any at all. Sometimes they are forced to sell below cost just to recoup some capital.
The rest of the producers are left with nowhere to sell their goods. Do that for too long and you no longer have a business.
Branding is the saviour here. If your product’s brand is so strong that the public demand it, and refuse to buy a home brand alternative, the retailer is forced to stock it or lose the sale.
Branding goes beyond price, it gives the customer a reason to buy.
Our job as marketers is to make people see and desire our products. They must be believed to be the best, with no acceptable plain-wrap alternative. And let’s face it, what a dull world it would be without Ferraris and Zegna - or even Dove soap, Ski yogurt, Kellogg’s All Bran.
So much of our time and effort goes into giving a brand its identity and personality. We need to believe in the concept, and support it ourselves.
What reminded me of this line of thinking was a few days spent with a quite large, successful Australian agency. Their staff were treated lavishly. Big espresso coffee machine, a dozen herb and flavoured teas, chocolates and sweeties, biscuits and big lounge chairs.
But then, looking behind the scenes, I saw crappy generic napkins, toilet paper, home brand milk, little things you wouldn’t notice, but I did. It said that part of them didn’t believe in what they were doing.
Now I’m sure that the management team didn’t run out to buy the dunny rolls. But someone amongst them should have pointed out to the staff that all their livelihoods depended on the world believing that branded products were superior.
Both at work and at home my insistence on branding was always well known. Plain wrap products were not allowed. If we didn’t look after our livelihood, how could we expect the public to buy our goods?
Because you are reading this column I assume you are involved in business, and somewhere in the process there is a product or service to sell. You’ve put a lot of effort into making it distinctive, superior, with its own personality. This is branding, even without bright colours or fancy logos.
Just as you hate somebody buying an inferior competitive product purely on price, you need to set a standard. That means buying the best - the branded - product, instead of racing to the bottom.
© Ray Beatty
ray@ebeatty.com
