“Soft power.” It is a weird combination of ideas, right? How can a power be soft? And yet, soft power can be credited with the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring, and the allure that the United States still holds for many people around the world. For a business, soft power rests in its brand. That illusive, intangible something that makes people want to buy a product or service more than the alternatives.
A private label brand is not the same as a commodity product. A recent trends report from Deloitte highlights a trend focused on the tension between commoditization and premiumization. Deloitte states, “To remain competitive, many retailers have shifted toward offering private labels…. While discount products (commodities) still represent the majority of private-label sales, the share of premium private labels continues to rise….”
Not that long ago, it would have seemed strange for companies to send their employees into consumers’ homes to observe how they used products and tackled challenges. Now, corporate anthropologists and ethnographers – researchers trained to observe people and cultures – are fairly common, especially among consumer goods companies. The same companies that once led the way in popularizing ethnographic research – customer-centric leaders such as P&G, Intel, Ford, and General Motors – are now...
Imagine for one minute – you are the owner of a business. You have created a product, but you know you need to be more than just a business selling a product. There’s many businesses out there selling similar products, that pretty much do the same thing as yours. No, it’s not enough for people to buy a product from you – they need to want to buy your product, You need a brand.
It’s tempting to consider marketing and finance to be completely separate business disciplines. Marketing is about subjective, edgy, creative things like brands and television commercials. Finance focuses on hard, cold numbers. In reality, as most experienced business leaders know, the two disciplines are deeply entwined in the successful management of a venture. Though it’s not the only factor, marketing is one of the most essential drivers of business profitability and high valuations. Marketing is about...
