Disruptive Branding by Jacob Benbunan

Author:Jacob Benbunan [Jacob Benbunan, Gabor Schreier and Benjamin Knapp]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2019-03-11T16:46:46+00:00

Launching new products

When you think of Sony, what do you recall first? Not the CEO, certainly not its advertising, nor the dreary wasteland of electronics shops through which its products are sold. Not even its symbol or logotype, if you can remember them. No. You think of its apparently endless range of brilliantly innovative products. Sony’s identity is largely conditioned by its products.

SOURCE Olins, 1989

It might seem like a no-brainer to say that brands have found success because they have great products. However, in our experience, it is an obvious truth that can sometimes be overlooked in the excitement of creating a brand. Because brand and product inform each other, one cannot go without the other.

A product doesn’t necessarily need to create a category or redefine an industry. But it does have to do what it does well. In today’s over-saturated markets, this is becoming more important than ever. Your product has to be able to offer something that others can’t – either in its features, or in the idea that you are selling.

A good example of this is Hiut Denim Co, a British jeans company founded in 2012. On the surface, the venture seemed doomed. At a time when the national appetite for fast fashion and rock-bottom prices showed no sign of abating, launching a jeans label where pairs retailed from £150 seemed, at best, optimistic.

Even if Hiut had some star provenance – it was the brainchild of the same people who had founded successful British outdoors brand Howies, which was sold to Timberland for £3.2 million in 2011 – how could its product stand out when it lacked the designer label or the attention-grabbing price?

The answer lay in the concept. Hiut’s jeans are made in Cardigan, a small town on the Welsh coast. For three decades, Cardigan had been the home of a factory that made 35,000 pairs of jeans a week for British retailer Marks & Spencer. But in 2002 the facility closed down and production moved to Morocco – taking 400 jobs with it. Enter Hiut. On their website they clearly state their purpose:

All that skill and knowhow remained. Without any way of showing the world what they could do. That’s why we have started The Hiut Denim Company. To bring manufacturing back home. To use all that skill on our doorstep. And to breathe new life into our town. Our town is going to make jeans again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.