Have you noticed how many consumer brands are trying to redefine themselves? It’d difficult to reposition an old brand in consumers’ minds.
In the last frew months, many are redefining their brand positioning from quality or convenience into price. Kind of following the recession trend I guess. They focus with a weekly or monthly estimate multiplied by 12. “just switch to our brand and save 15.50 a week- that’s over $800 a year.!
Hyundai just came out with an ad campaign where they will take the car back if you lose your job. Very creative use of recession-proofing the purchase. Overcoming objections!
McDonald’s has been trying to reposition their brand as more healthy for a while — especially since the supersize movie came out. Robyn McMaster at Brain Based Biz recently visited them to rediscover their brand and see if the products really merited the new positioning. 1/17/09 Update: This BusinessWeek story about the McDonald’s Makeover sheds some light onto their rebranding and new marketing position with a global redesign of the packaging. I find it interesting how they try to balance the green initiatives, obesity concerns, local grown ingredients, fast convenience food, low cost, global language constraints, and the whole friendly thing. When you consider all the constraints it is a wonder the brand isn’t in psychotherapy!
FedEx Kinko’s just relaunched their joint branding and now is re launching again as just FedExOffice. Good bye Kinko’s!
So what is the balance between brand equity, all the repositioning dollars and just plain old starting from scratch?
Are you rebranding your business in 2009? Even without realizing it - by abandoning your service and quality positioning in favor of low price positioning?
Consumers want to know what sort of value they’re buying, not only that the price is lower. Yesterday, I went to a Circuit City store, one of the 500 plus stores scheduled to shut down. There was lots of traffic, but few buyers. Even though CC was promoting their “closing down business” sale, their discounts were only 10% on their electronics. The public was expecting maybe 50% discounts, so they weren’t taking the bait.
Tim:
It’s odd isn’t it that 10% was all the lower they were willing to go. Maybe they had a bulk buyer who would scoop it all up at 11% off. Who knows.
As consumers get more and more “stuff”, I think value is really the driving force in purchase decisions especially in electronics which is a descresionary purchase.
Thanks for commenting!
Chris
I think people are dead right to have open eyes and expecting more price cuts. Companies have got to understand that they are not going to function without the approval of us, the customers!
Companies must also realise that if they are selling a low quality product, they will most likely get many returns due to flaws and/or unsatisfaction of any kind. In my opinion, I think it is vital that companies are willing to reimbursh people with cash if they can prove they bought the product in the beginning (through card and/or receipt).
So, the important thing for me is when I go shopping somewhere I want to be clear on two things:
1. How long is the returning period for the product (differs from countries I suppose).
2. Will I get my money back or do I get a voucer instead? Getting a voucer at a store where I nearly never shop at wouldnt be good for me, so the option of getting the money back or a voucer should be there no matter what!
So, in my opinion, when the product is on sale I still want to have a guarantee that I can return the product back AND get my money back! Some companies simply don´t think of how many customers they are losing by not returning their money back if they are not satisfied.