Business Strategy

It’s nearly impossible to escape the pervasive influence that brands have on our lives. In the broadest sense, brands constitute organizing mechanisms to help us navigate through each consumer day. What we drink, eat, or drive, what products we use at home and at work, where we play or vacation, where we live, what we watch, what we read, and even who we interact with, and how, are often choices informed by or shaped by branding. That is, they are a function of the set of values and perceptions we have about companies, products, services, or even TV shows, people, and places that form in our minds.

A business model consists of four things. First, it’s a description of how you make money, as it tells why and how your customers pay for your products and services. But even more important, a business model provides an experience, and that experience is essential to what people pay for. The difference between Saks Fifth Avenue and Walmart isn’t just the quality of the merchandise and the prices, it’s the way a customer feels because of the service they get, the atmosphere, the vibe.

As reported in Reuters, organizers of an advertising boycott campaign targeting Facebook, which has drawn support from a growing list of major brands, are now preparing to go global to increase pressure on the social media giant to remove hate speech.

If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg, he simply created an innovative piece of tech that enabled the world to “connect”. Well, that wasn’t particularly novel in 2005. We had Myspace, Friends Reunited and Bebo for that. Hell, you could message your friends in real time on Instant Messenger, long before Facebook Messenger launched in 2011.

From its beginning, Brandless was a contrarian naysayer. The company held fast to the notion that in the sea of consumables, brands do not matter but fungible products do. All things being equal, all things are essentially the same things, only different. Generic. Generally the same. Brandless.