Branding Strategy Insider

Of Strength and Store Brands

There is a seismic shift underway in store brand names. They are much more powerful than a decade ago, when they were rarely advertised and often packaged anonymously.

Today, store brands offer better quality, better design – and better names.

One of five items sold in U.S. stores in 2005 was store-branded. In Europe, the percentage is slightly higher. By 2020, sales of store brands are expected to reach 30% of the worldwide market, according to London-based M+M Planet Retail.

Two quick examples:

    * Wal-Mart’s brand of dog food, Ol’ Roy (named for the founder’s pooch) has quietly passed Purina as the world’s top-selling dog chow.

    * 7-Eleven introduced its own beer, dubbed Santiago, to steal share from the Mexican import Corona.

At the grocery goliath Kroger, there are more than 4,000 privately branded food and drink items.

At the French marketer Carrefour, a major internal branding program emphasizes quality, image and innovation. These store brands are not designed to sell merely on the basis of price. They are carefully named and positioned to elbow others off the shelf.

How much better is the quality?

Marketing Wisdom

•    Most bad marketing is driven by the desire to grow, which is in turn driven by Wall Street, which is in turn driven by greed. CEO's pursue growth to ensure their tenures, to increase their reputations, and to increase their take-home pay.

•    Another problem is trying to be all things to all people. That growth strategy fritters away resources on side battles, resources that ought to be concentrated on the main event. Decisions are a lot simpler when you've got one thing on which to focus.

•    The more things you try to become, the more you lose focus, the more difficult it is to differentiate your product. Mark Twain said it best, 'I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.'

•    When your business is more about great accounting than great products or great advertising, you're headed for trouble.

•    Set realistic goals, which Frank Typer defined brilliantly as those that are 'Beyond your grasp but within your reach.'

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Scent Marketing Success: Step 8 of 10

Our series on scent marketing continues with number 8 - Commit to your scent marketing program

Believe it or not, the main hindrance to successful scent marketing is poor tracking.

Evaluating the “before-during-after” scenario is crucial but often neglected. If you use, say, scent marketing to promote the sales of flowers in a supermarket then you have to capture (over a certain time period) and record the sales in the unscented environment. Then do the same during the scented period. For curiosity’s sake you may discontinue the use of scent altogether and see what happens. Were you able to successfully lay a scent track to the flower department? Did you generate loyalty and repeat purchases? How about playing with the price? Can you maintain an increase? There are plenty of scenarios you can play as long as your store and inventory management is plugged in.

You may want to push scent through your front door the same way some stores blow cold air on the sidewalk on a steamy day. A simple electronic people counter on the door can tell you if you were successful in doing so. Now the traffic is there, what do you do with it? Unless you have enough sales staff or product on hand you will not be able to increase your sales and capitalize on your scent marketing effort. You may even end up with a frustrated consumer.

Unless you keep close tabs on the results you will never find out if scent marketing makes sense for you. It would not be fair to give it a bad name only because efficiency has not been measured. The biggest issue with installed systems is not reliability of the delivery system itself but that the consumables are not replaced as required. Once you have made a commitment you need to stay with it and instruct your staff accordingly so they do not see it as a nuisance but an important component of your marketing.

Courtesy of Harald Vogt, Scent Marketing Institute

Sponsored By: Brand Aid