Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

Use Federal Express as your standard, and ask: How much does your
name communicate, how fast? Are you using color effectively? Is it conveying
the same message as your name?
The Brand Rush
A revealing week in my life:
Monday, a gifted lawyer calls. He quickly explains his problem. He is among
the premier practitioners in his specialty, but he is losing business to inferior
lawyers in two brand-name law firms. He wants that hole plugged.
Wednesday afternoon, the president of a contracting company calls. A
heavily advertised competitor is charging far more for comparable jobs and still
getting the bids, despite my caller’s roomful of industry trophies.
Thursday morning, the president of a professional consulting firm calls. Her
firm has grown incrementally by word of mouth, and cannot penetrate the more
lucrative, challenging, and prestigious accounts that would give the firm more
stature. The big-name firms own all those accounts.
This was an actual week in my life in 1995. By year’s end I was ready to dub
it The Year of the Brand Rush—the year when thousands of service companies
finally realized the enormous clout of brands.
Each caller was getting beaten by a brand. Each caller’s company offered
demonstrably excellent, even superior service, yet each was losing business to
brands. Each company was growing, but more sluggishly than it deserved.
But each executive had finally realized something critical:
In service marketing, almost nothing beats a brand.
Aren’t Brands Dying?

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The business magazine headlines ask, “Are Brands Dead?” You see several of
those headlines over time and decide the rumors must be true.
They aren’t.
Those who argue that brands are dying offer as Exhibit One the rise of store-
branded or generic products.
Those observers are overlooking something: Generic products are not truly
nonbranded. In a reputable store, the generic product carries a distinctive
promise: the promise of the store. The store promises that the product will
perform and that the store will back it. The generic product, in short, carries the
store’s brand.
Clearly, store-branded products have brands— service brands rather than
product brands, but still brands. To the customer, the fact that the store is
convenient and one with which the customer probably has dealt for years gives
that store brand special power.
But just for argument, assume that generic and store-labeled products are not
brands. Then what?
At this writing, store and generic brands own 7 percent of the market; name
brands own the remaining 93 percent. Considering the much lower cost of
generics and store brands, the heavy publicity about the high quality of many
store brands, and the number of savvy consumers who realize that many store
brands are simply name brands in store packaging, the fact that these store and
generic brands still own only 7 percent of the market seems amazing—until you
recognize the enormous power of a brand.
Name national brands charge substantially more—up to 40 percent more—
for products that often only equal store products in quality. Yet name national
brands still represent thirteen of every fourteen sales in the market. Amazing—
and perhaps the best evidence of the enormous power of brands.