Branding Blog

Fiona Gouthro

[fgouthro]

Reflection: Dark is Beautiful

After binging the second season of Netflix’s Bridgerton a few weeks ago, I saw a few tweets from Indian women expressing how happy they were to see two dark-skinned Indian women in leading roles on a popular television series. This led me to several articles on colorism in India and how important it was to increase representation of dark-skinned people in media. This was the extent of my knowledge on this topic until reading this case. My initial reaction was shock: I could not believe there are products that exist like this that are promoting fairness as beauty. This reaction caused me to reflect on my own privilege as a white female who has never had to think about this.  

I think what WOW and “Dark is Beautiful” are doing is very important in fighting this issue. The case asks if they should focus on approaching more public figures to talk about this issue or if they should focus on petitions such as the one involving Emami. Given unlimited resources, I believe that both of these actions are important and would pursue both in parallel. However, with the limited resources that WOW has, I would prioritize concentrating on petitions with companies promoting fairness products. The public figures speaking out on this issue are going to be always be fighting against the advertisements and media of large companies like HUL if they are allowed to broadcast their biases. This battle will not be easy, though leveraging organizations like ASCI who can continue to put stricter regulations on these companies could help.

If WOW is able to get these advertisements off the air, I do think it will still take time to change people’s embedded belief system that fairness is beauty. This is a bias that extends back generations and will not be easily broken. This is where public figures speaking out about their own experiences can help. I do not think that having celebrities talk about this issue will alienate the public – it is important to see that the role models and people we look up to are experiencing the same issues that we are. Having public figures speak out can also bring more global attention to this issue and can get more people to speak about their own experiences.

I am hopeful for the future that regulations will prevent companies from marketing fairness as beauty and organizations like WOW will be able to bring scaled awareness to this issue. I also hope that media companies like Netflix continue to showcase minorities in leading roles to increase representation and bring light to this issue in societies that are not aware it exists.

[fgouthro]

Product Diffusion Analysis - Collapsible Bike Wheel

For my post this week, I wanted to focus specifically on one of the four products discussed in the case from a Rogers’ five factors perspective. I decided to choose the collapsible bike wheel:

Relative Advantage – From an economic perspective, a bike with these wheels selling for $2000 to $6000 is much more expensive than the average commuter bicycle. There are also currently bicycles that collapse their frames (not wheels) and fold into a shape that is about the size of the bike’s wheels. With the target audience as couriers or commuters, I do not see a strong relative advantage that this product would have over existing commuter bicycles. Therefore, I believe this factor would slow product adoption.

Compatibility – Bicycles are a commonplace object we are all familiar with today. To add to this, having folding bicycles that exist already on the market helps the compatibility of this product. However, I imagine that consumers may be wary at first that their wheels may collapse on them during their ride. Though there is a mechanism in place to prevent this, it may take some time for this technology to build trust with the public. Generally, I believe this product’s adoption rate will not be swayed strongly by compatibility as it incorporates some novel and some old technologies.  

Complexity – Based on the description of the product in the case, collapsing the bike wheel sounds fairly simple to do. It involves “flicking one lever that locks into place when the wheel is round”. Therefore, I believe with this low complexity, product adoption rate will increase.  

Trialability – It is hard for me to imagine how this product will be trialed without consumers fully committing to buying the bike. If this is the case, then this factor will decrease the product adoption rate. If the company is able to partner with bike shops to allow consumers to trial the product for hours/days, this could potentially help with adoption rate so long as consumers had a positive experience with the trial.

Observability – The observability of this product depends on access to its target audience. At its current price point, I do not think many couriers or commuters will be able to afford the product, and thus it will not be very visible to the intended audience. I believe that this could have a negative effect on product adoption rate.

As a mechanical engineer, I thought this was a very cool concept originally. However, in going through these five factors, I could see how this product could have a slow adoption rate from the public. There is no strong relative advantage from existing products, it has low trialability, and low observability due to its high cost. The company can use this information to change its strategies (i.e., partnering with bike shops for trials, lowering cost, etc.) to help improve product diffusion.

[fgouthro]

Concha y Toro Reflection

This case made me think of a recent experience I had when purchasing a bottle of wine. I am not a wine expert and was attending a dinner party at my significant other’s family home where I would be meeting his family for the first time. I committed to bringing a bottle of wine to the party and wanted to make sure I chose a “high quality” bottle. I drove to the LCBO (a liquor store in Ontario, Canada), went to the wine section, and was immediately overwhelmed. The only thing I recognized on these bottles was the country and color. I quickly googled “Top Red Wines LCBO” and found the following list:

https://torontolife.com/food/holiday-wine-guide-the-lcbos-best-reds/

My original plan was to spend no more than $20 on the bottle and I was pleasantly surprised to see only one wine on this list met that criterion: the number one ranked wine. It was a 2017 Shiraz Cabernet from South Australia, a country I would not have expected to have the best red wine. I scrolled through the list seeing countries/places I expected to see: California, France, Spain, and Italy. I remember trying to decide between the 10th ranked wine from France and the wine from South Australia because France seemed like it was higher quality even though I was looking at a list that said otherwise. I ended up buying the South Australian wine and it was a real hit at the party (I truly recommend). I remember everyone being very surprised when I had told them where it was from.

Before reading this case, if you asked me to guess if Chile or South Australia had higher quality wines, I would have said South Australia. Based on my response above, this would have also put Chile below California, France, Spain, and Italy for no scientific reason other than perception of quality. Therefore, I do believe that for the general public (that are not wine experts), wine consumption is based on a perception of quality versus actual quality. Concha y Toro is in a hard place where they would have to be consistently ranked as the best wine globally (hard to do with so much competition) or rebrand their entire country to change this perception. Unfortunately, I do not think this is something that is easily done. To grow their company, I would advocate a “top-down” strategy where they exploit the prestige of their high-end wines to expand into the basic segment with the goal to improve margins through economies of scale. I believe they would perform better in these markets as consumers perceive them to be at a basic quality and would be more willing to try their wines.

All of this said, the next time I’m buying a bottle of wine, I’m going to try a bottle from Chile.  

[fgouthro]

Market Research Rookie

As someone with no previous marketing/business background, reading this case gave me a sense of the market research techniques available to companies and the challenges companies face when performing market research. In reading through the timeline of Quaker Oats’ Life Cereal’s market research efforts, I can conclude that successful companies likely do not limit themselves to one type of data, experiment, or technique when attempting to gain insights from their market to make business decisions. However, the case did highlight that it was very important for marketing managers to work with specialists to define the problem, determine the best way to collect information, and specifically define how that information would be used.

There were two main sections of the case that were most interesting to me: the “experiments” section and the “non-experimental/qualitative” sections. These were the two sections that made me reflect the most after reading the case. Starting with the experiments section, I thought the case did a great job at describing the purpose of having a control group in an experiment and why we do not want to only examine the effect of a treatment before and after. This was also the first time I had heard of laboratory testing and field testing in marketing. The typical laboratory test as described seemed much more involved than anything I’ve experienced from people at the mall (I’ve been approached for short surveys that require no follow up), and I was left wondering if they struggle with follow-up engagement in these types of experiments. For field testing, the “matched city pair” option seemed reasonable to me, but I wondered how they could choose cities that would be comparable enough to eliminate biases in the results. I was most impressed by the “within city” test and that our society has the ability to target marketing in this way. I was then quickly reminded of how social media uses individually targeted ads daily and was less surprised.

In the non-experimental/qualitative section, the social dynamics of structured questionnaires versus focus groups was something that interested me. The example in the case indicated that in a structured survey, people would be less likely to choose responses that would be perceived negatively by public opinion. Conversely, focus groups allowed people to feel less threatened, more natural and better suited for discussion of sensitive topics. I pictured myself in this situation and would personally find it easier to express controversial opinions in an anonymous survey compared to a public group. I could see however, that even anonymously, people would want to be perceived in a positive way by their peers and may answer these questionnaires in an aspirational way.  

[fgouthro]

Reflection - Black and Decker

In order to improve their market share in the Professional-Tradesmen power tools sector, I believe that Black and Decker should drop their name from their product and use the DeWalt name instead. As someone who previously has worked in an industrial setting where these tools are used, I know that the brand of the tool is very important to the tradesman. They want a tool that is of high quality and has a brand that will not put their masculinity at risk. As stated in the case by two tradesmen, they were made fun of by their colleagues when using the Black and Decker tools as they were associated with household products instead of trades tools. I do not think this association is something Black and Decker can come back from.

DeWalt is stated to be a brand that has a 70% awareness rating with most people positively disposed to it. It also has a “Is One of the Best” agreement percent of 63% from tradesmen as compared to Black and Decker’s 44%. As Black and Decker owns this brand, I believe using it in this industry with this initial reputation gives them a head start in taking market share from Makita. I would not recommend using any Black and Decker branding on the tool even though the purchase interest is shown to increase slightly. I think this may hurt the brand overtime as more people realize that DeWalt is owned by Black and Decker and may result in some customers having negative associations with the brand. I would adopt the yellow color selection as it differentiates the DeWalt product further from Black and Decker and it is unique but also matches with the bright color scheme of competitors tools in this industry.

Lastly, I wanted to mention that during my time working in an industrial setting where these tools were used, there were two clear brands preferred and used by tradesmen: Milwaukee and DeWalt. I could easily pick out the type of tool each tradesman was using based on the bright red or yellow colors. In reading the first few pages of this case, I was confused as to why they were not mentioning DeWalt – I did not realize they were owned by Black and Decker until the end of the case. Therefore, assuming this strategy was adopted by Black and Decker, I believe it worked.