Let’s start with a review of history. In 1945 industry covered 37 percentages of all work places in America. Today the unemployment figures are not shaking the ground, thus industry employees represent only 11 % of the working force. No one would deny what has happened: long transformation has been shifting workplaces from industry to service and knowledge industries.
If one would keep eyes in the Asia of today, she would see the phenomena that shaped the Americas in the past 60 years. The universities of China currently educate more than a million students. Every one of them eager to learn, penetrate, conquer and get rich. And compete for the same positions with the students of the old continents. To keep it short, without the income transfers it would make no sense paying an European or an American employee more of the work that an Asian or an African one makes with the same quality.
Universities or nationalities as brands won’t last long competing with hard working and better behaving masses. Maybe the competitive edge could be found from branding personalities. Skilful and well educated, but anonymous, odourless, and tasteless people might be good to be deployed by knowledge industry. But where it comes other than routine brainwork, the personality matters.
From the forties till nowadays we have seen a shift from product to brand. Now it might be time for a shift from anonymous identities to personality brands.
Nowadays price matters less. Internet is full of free services, product prices and features can be compared fast and easy, and second hand consumer-to-consumer market places have strenghten earlier often forgotten life cycle stages of goods.
More often marketers clashes a situation where income does not reflect wheather consumer buys cheap or expensive. Small income furniture freak might eat Lidl just to get her vintage Arne Jacobsen’s. At the same time when branded products are produced more and more in China, also generic China products are facing their second upswing. Generic brands provide often consumers physically same good, but without the label. Would you really care buying Uncle Ben’s instead of a white label one, assuming the source is same, but price just the half. So China is good. At least at the glance.
Besides often carrying a brand name that reflects several expectations and experiences of perceived image, product itself is an experience. World carries thousands of examples where a product has become self-feeding cult (Starbucks, Google, Diesel, Apple, PlayStation, etc), some of them being advertised, but all of them with “build-in-marketing mechnanism”. As Paul Isakson said or recycled “make the product so great, people can’t help talk about it”.
But is a product an experience also without the brand name? For sure you can enjoy nameless cola drink as much as the Coca Cola or Pepsi if you are thirsty. For sure you could drive non-branded car, if it would go smoothly as Rolls Royce. But would it still be the same? Besides boosting the ego or setting the social norms, brand has a promise and at the stage of consuming the good, it turns to a satisfaction. Marketing is not dead, its living better than never before. Greating huge stories like Coca Cola Happiness Factory or expensive co-branding like Coke + Faithless would not make sense in rational world where consumer would buy the cheapest soda. Our world is not a brainwash, it’s all emotion.
So maybe a product can’t be an experience without label and a generic China experience is not realism. And the price matters, after all. Whether being a brand or not, my pocket experience tolds the truth. “Designed in California, Assembled in China.”
Photo: Apple.com
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