The Gilman Company Blog

Pricing Strategies: Branding

What happens to Coca-Cola when you take the brand away, when it can't be called or referred to as Coca-Cola anymore? Really. What happens? You're not left with much. You can't sell 20 ounces of carbonated water, sugar and vanilla extract for $1.50 anymore.

Once upon a time there were "brandless" grocery products. Remember those? A white label aluminum can with plain blue letters that read "COLA." Those aren't around anymore. The power of "brand" was just too strong for truly generic products to exist in every product category. Now, in many cases, for many grocery products, we're left with the odd little term "generic brand." Even generic is a brand now.

Back down memory lane. Recall, just a short time ago, when entire buisness models were based on brand. Brand development, brand statement, brand value, etc. Just about everything in a business model can be discussed in terms of "brand." Why is brand so important? It's important because at the core of brand lies "value." If the folks at Pepsi or Coca-Cola had one last dollar to spend, it would be spent on maintaining the brand.

The bottom line. If you're starting from scratch, and unknown brand is better than no branding at all. If you're already branded, the trick is to increase the value of the brand, such that you can charge a premium for the product or products associated with that brand.

Look for other "Pricing Strategies" posts here.

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Google Adopts "Innovation Reviews"

Flipping through the print edition of the Wall Street Journal, it's interesting to see that Google is reorganizing its effort to leverage the ideas its employees come up with. The fact that Google encourages its staff to take one work day a week to work on projects that are not related to their jobs has led to some interesting innovations. But how do you harness the value of those ideas? After all, Twitter was developed by former Google employees. If your Google, you harness those ideas by managing your innovation resources. Here, the company has drawn more dotted lines to senior management and executives and a process is developed that lets innovation easily trickle up for review by executives.

This process certainly puts more responsibility on senior management and executives, but when your competitors are biting at your heels and you've invested a lot on employing the best of the best, you want to make sure that very little or none of the innovation you're paying for slips away. This issue of managing innovation, also marks a unique problem for rapidly growing companies and intellectual property.

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The First Time is the Hardest

 Some business firsts of notoriety.

1. You've decided to leverage social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or Squidoo to expand your online presence.

2. You're developing or expanding to a new product category for your business.

3. You're knocking on the door of an all-new associate or business partner.

5. You're going to establish a corporate blog.

6. Your going to make the leap to a start-up.

7. Or, God forbid, you're finally getting a website.

Whatever first it is, it goes without saying, that the first time is the hardest. You can expect whatever your doing for the first time in business to take more resources, things like your time, money and your resolve, just to name a few. What you don't want to think is something like this: "If this is what having a website is like, it's not worth the trouble." Or, "expanding my sporting goods line to include clothing is a bear of a project." Getting started is the hardest part.

Bonus tip: Plan your "first" strategically based on market conditions and your company's position. Also, understand that normal operations of your "first" will be much easier than getting it started was.

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