Why Brands Aren't Going Anywhere

A discussion of the role of brands in a world of information efficiency.

This morning Felix Salmon tweeted James Surowiecki's latest article about brands at me to see what I thought. Basically Surowiecki makes the case that brands are less meaningful in a world of information efficiency thanks to the web. His thesis, roughly:

It’s a truism of business-book thinking that a company’s brand is its “most important asset,” more valuable than technology or patents or manufacturing prowess. But brands have never been more fragile. The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos. “Absolute Value,” a new book by Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford, and Emanuel Rosen, a former software executive, shows that, historically, the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment. When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good. It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, nearly four-fifths of American car buyers stayed loyal to a brand.

He then goes in to talk about cars and travel and a lot of other stuff that people spend a lot of time researching. In response I shot off four quick Tweets that I thought were worth sharing here:

1. Using a luxury brand (Lululemon) is fundamentally flawed. Luxury is all brand. You can fall as fast as you rise. I understand calling Lululemon luxury is a bit of a stretch, but I think it's pretty accurate. But the second part is really the point: However fast a company rises it can fall at the same speed. We've seen lots of businesses reach saturation and struggle and this isn't necessarily what happened to Lululemon, but it could be a part of the picture. To solely say that it was based on consumer's ability to do research seems odd. Seems like a classic story of a brand growing really quickly and then struggling to maintain it's growth. Often those brands come back quickly and continue to grow, though, so the story is far from over.

2. Where is the evidence that suggests buying on non-research products has changed? He touches on this a bit towards the end by writing, "This isn’t true across the board: brands retain value where the brand association is integral to the experience of a product (Coca-Cola, say), or where they confer status, as with luxury goods. But even here the information deluge is transformative; luxury travel, for instance, has been profoundly affected by sites like TripAdvisor." But again, travel has always been a category that a lot of research goes in to. Anywhere people research, that research will move to the web. The fundamental truth of most products is they're not research-driven. This is why CPG is always near the top of the largest ad spenders.

3. Research-heavy products (TVs, cars) have become much more price-efficient. Duh. Not sure there's much to say here, but he specifically hits on how cars have been squeezed to be much more efficient. This is not rocket science and is a good thing for consumers. No debate here, just not a very interesting point.
4. Consumers have always been in control. There is more efficiency in the market now, but fundamentals are the same. This is the big piece. I've argued this often. Word of mouth always drove purchasing decisions. Certainly this is much more efficient, but I'm not sure I'd say it's a sea change.