The taste of brand… shaken, not stirred
Good Freakonomics post on why there are so many new competing brands of vodkas compared to other liquors. The consensus among the comments is that it’s about brand and marketing vs. taste, since vodka is supposed to be as tasteless as possible.
Which makes for an interesting question for a marketing class somewhere: how do you differentiate a product that is supposed to be, well… perfectly un-different.
The answer, of course, is brand. When Absolut began its wonderful print campaign, they were in the relative basement of vodkas, to say nothing about booze preference in general. Within a couple years of that campaign’s launch, they had not only increased their own sales immensely, but had increased the marketshare of vodkas across the board by 30%. Best of both worlds: they grew the pie and their piece of it.
It makes for a good way of starting one part of a branding brainstorm conversation. How would we brand this product if there was abolutely (ha ha) no product or service difference between us and the other guys? What role in customers’ stories do we want our stuff to play? What kind of prop is it? How does it fit into their lives? What does our brand taste like?
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It seems just a smidgeon overly self-congratulatory to say that the growth, not just of Absolut vodka, but of its entire market segment was due entirely to Absolut’s clever advertising and overall marketing strategy when bar culture, night life activity and hell, even cigar smoking for both men and women, shot through the roof at roughly the same time. You could just as easily credit HBO via Sex in the City for the free marketing they gave mixed drinks every time a cast member downed another classic cosmopolitan. Really, though, Absolut did very well by the tendencies of an entire decade, of a hedonistic bubble-era, simply because the 90s were all about disposable income — mostly pretty young people connected to the exploding tech sector actively disposing of what they saw as a bottomless well of easy moolah, at that.
The ugly side of the same figures, however, show that same group of young people, Generation Y, as the first generation in American history to have a fully negative net worth — that means credit card debt, a car loan or two and no assets to speak of. Generation X barely maintains its bank accounts and the Baby Boomers aren’t looking to invest much of *their* private income into their heirs, they’re far too busy exploring the Caribean and Alask with Carnivale’s Cruise Lines. At no other point in history have we felt so comfortable investing entirely in the moment and entirely in our personal, private pleasures.
All of which might simply be very… interesting. We could debate the relative safety of throwing all of our assets outside of our neighborhoods, towns, communities, states, nation, etc, into the jackpot of our global economy, as we’re doing now, hoping against hope we don’t wind up with 99% of our debt and more than all of our assets in the pocket of a nation we don’t very much like…
Except that every global summit on the human environment and sustainable development since the first UN conference in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972 has pointed to the extensive damage caused by First World overconsumption. Did you know that the US currently consumes over 60% of the worlds resources? To put that into perspective, we don’t even occupy a third of the world’s land mass, never mind population. Using William Rees’ Ecological Footprinting, we can demonstrate that if every person on the earth lived at a solid middle-class US standard, we’d need over 20 planets in order to keep up with our material consumption.
And we’re already feeling palpable negative feedback from the Overconsumption lifestyle — not just in global warming, environmental degradation, famines in the third world, pandemic species extinction, roadrage in gridlock, hypertension, heart disease, cardiac arrest, chronic obesity, the form of diabetes once known as Adult Onset which has been renamed because it is now so prevelent among juveniles, rising rates of cancer, fatty liver, rising rates of depression and incidences of suicide, but the full on 85% of Americans polled who’ve stated that life is meaningless and just barely worth living. Are we really killing off the polar bears for the sake of stuff that just makes us wake up with a deathwish in the morning?
All of which makes the taste of luxury-item name-branding fall, well, not just flat, but a little sour and noxious, too, like an unintentional inhale of stale, second-hand smoke.
Jen: Yeah, but they’re really good ads.