Can you ever have a product brand?

I have been working on a project over the past few weeks that has got me thinking about so-called “product brands” again.

In general, I assert that there is no such thing as a “product brand” (with apologies to Proctor & Gamble, sometimes it is JUST a washing powder). Of course there are some exceptions, but they are few and far between and almost never free of the protective and influential umbrella of their proud parents.

For example, would the iPod and iPhone have attained their success if they had not been underpinned by the strength of the overall Apple brand? Safe to say, probably not. Apple’s core of design and innovation and usability are the very reasons they are great products, and are also the reasons people buy them.

Things get murkier for single product companies, where quite often the product becomes the company and vice versa. This presents its own challenges which I wrote about earlier this year here.

The idea of a product brand was first drafted into service at Proctor & Gamble, and it is rooted in “brand with a small b” – that is the brand as marketing school of thinking (as opposed to brand with a big B or brand as central organising principle).

Fundamentally the value of a product brand is to “create” a series of associations around the product, so you can make people feel good about paying more for it and hopefully build loyalty to it as a protective measure from competition. Now I am not a B2C expert, but I have put in enough hours to know that if what is behind the product doesn’t have the strength of its’ convictions, then the product’s life expectancy is limited.

So back to my original question – can you eve have a “product brand”? To quote from my manifesto – ” While what your products and services do, can, should and will change over time, the brand underlying them – the who – will not. People buy things from companies, not from products. Seems obvious…”

And, this is the very point that is the nail in the proverbial product brand coffin. While products sometimes come with a promise (whether any of them keep that promise is a whole other conversation), they don’t come with values. They are largely inanimate and any values projected onto them are the work of the organisation and people behind them. This is where the real strength of brand is.

There is not a product in the marketplace that wasn’t thought up and bought to fruition by an organisation. And you can’t get a great apple if the tree that it grows on isn’t strong and healthy. That is where brand starts. The rest is just marketing and so are most so-called product brands.

See you next week.

Michel Hogan is a Brand Advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States, she helps organisations recognise who they are and align that with what they do and say, to build more authentic and sustainable brands. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment.