If you want a successful brand, treat it like a tree
The same rule applies to brands. If you have been able to create a brand that has found some space in consumers’ minds, a brand that allows you to sell your produce at a premium versus your unbranded competition and to avoid the price battle – well, your job is not done.
Your brand still needs your attention. You need to be always consistent with your quality. You need to avoid reducing prices in a way that affects your brand’ perceived value. And you need to keep on supporting your brand by remembering its reason to exist to your target customers.
This is why the strongest brands periodically communicate. To them, investing in advertising means protecting their space in consumers’ minds. It means insuring against possible attacks from competitors. It means building barriers to entry for likely new entrants.
In produce, some brands regularly show up on television, magazines, the web. Most often, they do not say anything new – but still they remember consumers they exist, and reinforce reasons for which people should buy them.
Other brands do not behave the same way. There are some brands that live on what they did many years before, and no longer invest in communication - they believe their plant will survive forever anyway. Other brands communicate when the market is good and they make enough profits, and then disappear when things get harder.
These brands have no future.
At the beginning, nothing will happen. But slowly, little by little, they will die as a plant that gets no more water. Enough time passed, nobody will remember of them.
And the companies that own these brands will be back at where they started – commodity producers whose only chance to sell will be having a lower price than the others.
For more information:
Maurizio Pisani
Email: [email protected]
www.pisanifm.it
