

The Trouble with Brands - quizbiz
http://www.strategy-business.com/press/freearticle/09205

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noonespecial
_The final major problem with brands is loss of trust. Our data shows that the
amount of trust consumers place in a brand today is a ghost of what it was 10
years ago._

I remember the first time I bought a Sony walkman and it performed more poorly
than a Sanyo of half the cost, then died completely. I opened it to try to fix
it and found inside... all Sanyo parts!

The moral: Brands are (or were) more than a marketing gimmick. Putting a
sticker on a white label product is not a magical transformation. Customers
are not fooled. When someone dials your phone number for help, encasing them
in inescapable machine menus, or connecting them to someone on another
continent who's never even seen your product is _not_ an acceptable solution.
A good brand used to be a promise that this kind of nonsense wouldn't happen;
No more, it seems.

In short, if you want the return of customer loyalty to a brand, _try not
sucking_.

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dasil003
I made it through a few pages... it's interesting enough, but frankly a lot of
it is common sense (brand saturation, loss of trust, uh-huh, tell me something
that's not obvious). I shudder to think how they compute a figure like "brands
provide 30% of shareholder value".

