BRAND AS EXPERIENCE

David Merrefield

The meaning of what constitutes a brand is making a subtle shift, or so it seems based on the buzz I've heard lately.

Here's what has been, and what's changing: Traditionally, a brand has been a mark, extended by the maker of a product to the user of a product. The mark represented the pledge of the maker, or manufacturer, that the product possessed certain qualities. Implicit was that the marked, or branded, product would serve a certain utility, be constructed of certain materials, cost a roughly predictable amount and exhibit those qualities on a consistent basis.

The fact that brands promise consistency explains why fledgling retail formats always fill their product mix with branded product alone. Then, as formats mature -- taking on their own promise -- private labels are layered into the mix.

According to a survey published last year in Brand Marketing, "The Century of Brands: One Hundred that Changed America," successful brands abundantly fulfill the promise implicit in branding. Here are a few such brands cited in the report: Betty Crocker, Ivory, Campbell's, Kleenex, Band-Aid, Sesame Street, NASCAR and on it goes. (Brand Marketing is a unit of Fairchild Publications, New York, as is SN.)

Those brands all successfully deliver to consumers a consistent value proposition, but in addition to that, successful brands such as those go beyond their basic promise and deliver something more: An experience of some sort. The experience might be comfort, cleanliness, wholesomeness, excitement or whatever. Features of those sorts have long been promoted and impressed on consumers' minds by advertising.

Indeed, that has been carried out so successfully that experience itself can become a branding position, and does. A good example of that is Rainforest Cafe. That restaurant chain provides a lot of experience: A jungle motif with waterfalls, birds and whatnot. In that format, experience all but supplants what should be at the core of a restaurant's offer, the meal. Similarly, in apparel retailing, Old Navy stores, with their in-store decor of trucks, gas pumps and music also trump product with the shopping experience. Supermarkets too can use experience as a brand, and they do. Wegmans Food Markets, Whole Foods Market and Publix Super Markets, to cite a few, each offer a shopping experience that, in a way, constitutes their branding position. The experience-as-brand may center around excellent fresh-prepared food, healthy food or unparalleled cleanliness and service.

The beauty part of that type of branding position is that it offers an experience for which consumers are not just willing to pay, but for which they willing to pay extra. That offers some insulation from the ugly realities of price-driven competition. And that will become increasingly important as retailing megaplayers seek to hobble others by leveraging size to provide ultralow price points.