When I was named director of brand management and marketing at Hallmark, most of the company’s leadership team viewed the company as a greeting card manufacturing company.
If you’re a marketer, commodity status is a bad thing for your brands. It indicates that your product or service is undifferentiated, that it rises and falls with the market and that it carries no inherent value beyond that. That’s fine when things are going well, and supply cannot keep pace with demand – it’s not so good when the dynamics are reversed. Here I explain how and why perceived brand value degrades to commodity...
Every brand strives to win, but what happens when you compete in a market where you are, and can never be more than, number two?
There’s crises and dangers everywhere we look. From ISIS to mass shootings, pandemics to weather events, Greek debt to commodity slumps, the actions and repercussions stream onto our devices in a seemingly endless scroll. In that sense the world we live in has changed little from when I was a child. We may consume the news differently and the dangers themselves may be different and much more widely covered, but the media thrives on uncertainty...
It’s tempting to believe that every brand must be vastly different and that every opportunity to push the boundaries should be taken if the brand is to win. But is there a case for normality that we’re missing here? Should, as Jay Bauer has suggested, brands stop trying to be amazing and just get on with being useful?
