ARE FIGHTER BRANDS THE WAY TO GO?
ARE FIGHTER BRANDS THE WAY TO GO?
Friday, 09 February 2007 03:35
As products with private labels continue to infiltrate the market leaving established brands with little room in market share what options are open for established brands. Most retailers have opted to open their doors wide open to private labels with some not just opening doors but also doing repackages which are clearly branded the stores name writes JOYCE KAMAU.
As competition intensifies in the corporate scene most companies are resorting in fighter brands as the new marketing strategy but is this way to go? As the concept gains popularity in the race to capture market dominance in an almost saturated market and to cope with a new breed of more conscious consumers, companies are almost duplicating ideas as they adopt the fighter brand strategy. Is the employ of attention to fighter brands particulary on price the right turn as each manufacturer tries to entice consumers to look their way. Should the balance of in-store communications between the discount brand fighter and the premium tier shift toward the brand fighter as costsavings become more of a priority to consumers.
A glance at the local retail market where nakumat has proved to be the market leader their marketing concept of rewarding customer loyalty by way of smart card whose shoppers are entitled to discounts has given other players in the retail industry a run for their money with most duplicating the idea. Safaricom with a highly innovative marketing team and with it’s acknowledgement as a market leader has left Celtel with no choice but to incept brands to fight those of safaricom which has a significant market share and dominance. After the launch of Bamba fifty as part of its convenient top up modules celtel came up with a price fighting brand which is lower priced t but with a similar naming bamba forty. Fighter brands can be used by either way of price by having a product similar to the one your competitor has and having it priced lower than what your competitor is offering, discounting or by way of quantity.
In this scenario a company will put a product that its competitor has in the market marked on the same price but with more quantity. A clear indication of this is in the biscuits industry where after parle-g an imported biscuit brand was introduced in an already saturated market it came packaged in 500gm retailing at a little over seventy five shillings then biscuit giant JOJO countered the move with a 400gm package at almost the same cost.
Facing a marketplace overflowing with stores, most retailers have spent the past several years tirelessly searching for new ways to grow their businesses and, at the same time, their brands. It is near impossible to imagine a retailer surviving and flourishing in the years to come without creating a genuinely robust retail brand program. What does the future hold as the market sarturation remains on the rise and consumers become more dmanding and sophisticated with changing needs and a shifty economy with more open brand programs manufacturers can only find better ways of presenting their brand programs else they risk repossioning their brands. With a downward spiral on margins where price reductions are employed as a means of fighting opposing brands corporates need to be keen not to loose their margins on one hand as they stretch out the other to catch growing turnover.
However branding experts still say that the last thing major players can afford to do is to neglect their branding as the pricing floor drops, even if the exercise appears futile at times. The brand actually matters more when prices are driven down because then you raise suspicions about quality,The more prices drop, the more skeptical people get about the products. There's a segment of customers that are mainly interested in price, but I don't think they're the majority and I don't think they're the most desirable customers. The majority are interested in quality, ease of use and support. Companies that succeed are the ones that balance the need for short-term price promotions with a long-term view of what's good for the brand. As such corporates ought to look at issues pertaining to market segementation and brand positioning before employing the brand fighting stratergy. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
