Whirlpool makes home appliances. A lot of these home appliances are “smart.” This means the appliances can be connected to your in-home WIFI and stream your behaviors and your appliances’ “health” back to Whirlpool. Unfortunately for Whirlpool, it appears that customers are not buying into this “relationship.” Customers have either disabled or not synced the connection. This worries Whirlpool.
Brands are defined as much by their market and competitors as their own unique characteristics. Just consider what happened recently to the airline industry where the problems of a single carrier shaded the whole industry. This means building and maintaining a brand must include paying attention to the market as a whole.
Trust matters. This one word – so loaded with meaning and impact – drives competitive market share and pricing in industry after industry where outputs are hard to assess or delivered as a service. Moreover, if a customer doesn’t trust a company, loyalty will be fickle.
It’s never too early to start thinking about your brand strategy. Look at the stats: eight out 10 of new businesses fail not because they don’t have great products, but because small and medium-sized business owners held off on “marketing” or “branding” as foreign to their success. “Wait until we get our product right,” they tell themselves. (Insurance firm Embroker reports the fail rate at nine out of ten.)
The recently passed Infrastruture and Inflation Reduction Acts include sweeping provisions to reduce emissions from gas-powered vehicles and advance the adoption of electric cars. And more recently National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has revised its fuel-efficiency standards upward to an average of 49 miles per gallon for new cars by 2026.
