Bryce Blakely's Blog

Product differentiation is how your product is set apart from the others on the market. It would perhaps not be too imposing a generalization to say that when product differentiation comes to mind it comes in a physical sense. That is to say there is actually a physical, tangible difference that sets one product apart from the other. But, as the tone of this post may have already revealed, this is not always the case.

Dialogue Headwear is a small company based out of Toronto, Ontario, that produces toques and baseball caps for the extreme sports market with a focus on the snowboarding community. Dialogue has been successful in differentiating their product not through R&D but through social marketing. They made their hats seem exclusive within the market. If you had one you knew about something most didn’t, you were a savvy snowboarder. From this “clubhouse” branding Dialogue actually has managed to gain weight and now has their products carried in some of Toronto’s trendiest stores. They played to the obscurity of fledgling business and managed to use their lack of brand recognition into the defining aspect of their brand.

If you’ve been even passively following the media over the past few years you know that the music industry has a problem. A very serious problem at that, pricing; what do you charge people for something they can just as easily get for free. Any economist will tell you that any rational person will download music for free, it costs too much money to not. So the problem is transformed from what do you charge them, to how? Justification? Pleas that piracy is destroying the industry the consumers so love and that they are thereby hurting the musicians they love when they download illegally. Business world pay attention, this is how you pricing in the music industry of tomorrow is going to work. Members of the UK alternate rock group Radiohead decided for their 7th release, In Rainbows, that the band would sell it independently online. The band decided that the consumer would decide what they would pay for the album, you could say pay $15 on your credit card or simply type in free and download it. In Rainbows outsold Hail to the Thief, the band’s previous album with Parlophone Records.

A free market is a fairly straight forward concept when you break it down to its fundamentals. Private organizations provide the goods and services for the consumers for private profit. There is no grey area here. This is a black and white concept, it is capitalism. In 2008 a new concept was introduced, businesses can be “too big to fail”. Private companies, usually banks, can grow so big that they literally are supporting the whole economy and if they were to fail the entire economic system as we know it would begin to collapse. When the government supports a corporation with capital it’s no longer capitalism, or is it? Could the economy really fail as a result of the failure of one or more major entities? Is capitalism a system that allows for infinite growth or is there a limit where the system ceases to be feasible?

To Google; to search the internet using the Google search engine, I googled, he is googling. If you ever want to know anything you can google it, find something, google it, go somewhere, google it. It would not be too broad a generalization to assume that most students at this university have told someone or been told to google something. As a matter of fact I “googled” Google to get the definition for the intro to this post. In the last few classes we extensively covered positioning, branding, getting your brand established in the public eye. Google is a textbook example of this theory. The name Google has become so ingrained, so associated with the service Google provides; internet search engine, that it has become that service. You’re not searching for something on the internet, you’re googling it. The name and the action become subconsciously associated, you’re thinking of it even if you’re not. 91 million searches per day, that’s how positioning works.

…But if you’re still not sure you can always google it http://www.google.ca/