Is brand marketing and promotions deteriorating?

Today we are surrounded with millions of products around us and receive not millions but thousands of messages about different products. So how are organizations able to create a space between their branded products and the no-name products (these are the products that you see for the first time on the shelf).

Advertising Agency: Fischer América, São Paulo, Brazil Photography: Inez Van Lamsweerde, Vinoodh Matadin

Advertisements are pretty interesting these days. Many a times I feel the ads are better than those of today’s movies, think of this generation’s zoo-zoo ads of Vodafone. Organizations are spending huge amount of their budgets to create brand image and that space that differentiates themselves from other brands. These organizations keep huge margins for profit. It can be said that “the most successful vendors in many product categories are the ones that sell high-end products to small group of people or consumers”. To support the statement I am have done a comparative study over the sales figure of Nokia and Apple (iPhone). Nokia sales 20 times more handsets than that of Apple iPhone. Still iPhone generates as much profits as Nokia.

Today the consumers are quality oriented and less care about the shorthand. Today the buyers have access to different rating scales like Amazon’s user ratings. Which made the consumers take more precise decisions for their purchase. A recent Nielsen survey found that more than sixty per cent of consumers think that stores’ generic products are equal in quality to brand-name ones. Today brands matter less when asked to buyer, “if I can buy the same service/ product for at a much lesser prices than what the bigies’ offer why shouldn’t I go for it” was the reply from one of my colleague upon asking whether he would be interested in buying a product off the shelf at a much lesser price.

The whole point of spending huge money to create brands is to create a buying preference among the buyers to support a higher selling price and making large profits. If the buyer in a grocery store has an tendency to buy anything even off the shelf and is not swayed by the brand promotions then what’s the point of spending such huge amounts on brand promotions. The belief is pretty simple; if the buyer finds a similar product of same quality off the shelf even if its no-name company then its a sure that the buyer is supposed to go for it and all the money that is spent for the product’s/ service’s brand promotions is flushed through the toilet.

The only way to charge higher margins from the buyer and to brand preference is to provide him with product differentiation and better customer experience. That’s what I have learned from Apple, creating better customer experience, product uniqueness, differentiation etc. That is why the iPhone simply flies over the shelf even after a 50% margin set by Apple. Apple’s promotional activities helps bring attention of the buyers to its products but eventually its the Apple’s customer experience that creates the customer preference.