Month: March 2012

In an article from Trendwatching.com entitled, “Flawsome: Why brands that behave more humanly, including showing their flaws, will be awesome”, the writer focused on ideas as to why brands who are more personal are becoming more appealing to and gaining more loyal clients. Brands that possess traits such as being honest or transparent, being open to communication, being caring and most importantly being apologetic when mistakes are made, are able to make genuine connections with their clients. This ties to the fact that with numerous amounts of brands present within every industry and every spending bracket, there is a need for companies to find a way to develop loyalty.

This article simply made me aware of what I already have been doing, which is advocating the brands that have people who actually provide support and reach out to render better services or products to me. So it made me think of this example, for instance you are looking for a potential replacement for a position within your company, and you set minimum requirements for the “hard skills” that are needed and make sure that everyone who applies meets all these requirements before they move on to the interview with you. That being said, how else would you then differentiate/select the “one” candidate from the others?  I would look for the candidate that possesses attributes that match/benefit me or my company, and I’m guessing you would do the same. Keeping that in mind, then in choosing brands, it would make most sense or be natural for us to choose brands that we find common ground with. Don’t get me wrong quality and design play integral roles in our decision making, but with the myriad  of products available, in our eyes the playing field for these brands are relatively equal.

Just like the article stated, as consumers, we’re not looking for the perfect brand, because we know that   does not exist and we often have negative reactions to people/brands that look at themselves as perfect. We’re simply looking for the brand that knows how to be a “friend”, knows how to reciprocate, communicate and most importantly knows how to generate added value. The bottom-line is, company or brand values and their alignment with consumer values are very significant. In this day and age, most brands already meet the “standards” that we [consumers] have set for their products and we expect nothing less, it’s the subtleties and intricacies involved in being able to develop genuine “relationships” with clients that actually make certain brands stand out.

I’m writing this in response to Dan Neufeld’s blog post about Heinz’s decision to produce a line of coloured ketchup. In his blog post, he highlighted reasons as to why this product line failed to succeed in the long run. I agree with all the reasons he posted, as well as the points highlighted by the blog he [Dan] wrote the post on, which is from Fastcompany. Dan covered the points as to why this product did not succeed. These points being that the marketing done by Heinz targeted the wrong audience, Heinz overestimated the life span of the product, and Heinz changed something that was already fundamentally attributed to its product; ketchup is red.

To supplement Dan’s post, I’ll be talking about two specific product that involve odd colours that did succeed, and I’ll be giving one fundamental reason as to why I think they did.

Doritos 3D: Monster Colorz – changes the colour of your tongue to blue as oppose to the normal orange [cheese]

Dark Vador Burger – burgers on a pair of dyed black buns

I believe that these two products succeeded, because of the fact that their producers recognized the products’ purpose. They recognized that these are NOVELTY products. Meaning, the main purpose of these products were to drive up interest in the main products, normal Doritos and normal burgers from Quick. They were both released for a limited time, in limited quantities, and they were tied up with blockbuster hits. They both stirred up their own buzzes, the Dark Vador burger was featured in multiple blogs and even in CNN, while Doritos 3D was well promoted by Frito-Lays.

The bottom line is that, branding and positioning are important. Important enough to the point where it can be argued that making the wrong decisions on either of these aspects guarantee product failure. The producers of these products did not try and push the product line [abrupt repositioning] like Heinz did, because they knew that the product life of these novelties were short and interest in them would most certainly die down. They were basically edible marketing campaigns, and they served their purpose.