Jessica Li's Blog

“it’s time to admit that while you may think you own the brands, in truth, the brands own you.” I love how Jenny Zimmermann positions the power of brand in people’s life. These days, when people screen out all those brands while walking down the hallway of a mall, the first thing that comes up of people’s mind might not be how much it costs, how I like the brand, etc. A lot of people, especially Asian people, or to be more specific, Chinese people, might be thinking how most of their friends and families think of that brand. For example, “COACH” is a middle priced brand at its Cash Cow or Dog stage of market share in a marketing term. When my mom talks about this brand, she states this brand as a showoff evidence for people who earn not much income but think that they do compared to their peers. In that case, my mom wouldn’t rate this brand high compared to others because she thinks people would think the same way on her if they see her using that brand. However, for me and a few of my friends, we don’t emphasize on any brands or price, we only focus on how products appear to us. Therefore for us, packaging and marketing becomes the most important criteria that would affect our opinion about a product, not the size of its market already appealing to my surrounding peers.

Using Telus of an example of how I think branding would affect my life. Their advertisements are about their humanity of services, and they use a lot of animal characters to represent peace and nature. Thus whenever I think of Telus, I feel natural, quiet and even fresher air. It brings me calmness and friendliness to some extent.

Not only their poster graphics, their promotional video uses the same idea to grab people’s attention and likelihood to their brand as well, and of course, terminally, their products. 

Relative to one of their largest competitor, Rogers for which ads focus more on product characteristics, Telus has the advantage of immersing their service selling point into people’s mind and life.