#bad brands

[stevetown]

Losing my mind at this photo album brand name. Didn’t you read the thing about how human brains just read the first and last letters of words and fill in the rest or whatever?

[vocaladymagazine-blog]

Beauty & the Beast: 4 Beauty Brands to Avoid

The cosmetics industry is a $50 billion giant that includes products ranging from skin moisturizer and makeup to toothpaste and deodorant. With such a wide variety of products, most of which use a …

With the rise of beauty brands on social media, it’s easier than ever to know the good, the bad, and the ugly about the people behind the brands.

Shout out to @racistbeautybloggers and @ohdeardoedeere for all the hard work they’ve done getting to the bottom of these controversies.

[fusion360blog]

The Worst Brand Extensions Of All Time

Brand extensions can be great for business growth when executed correctly. However, they sometimes flop. When they don’t sell as expected, it’s usually because the product’s attributes don’t align closely enough with consumers’ previous experience of the company’s product. For instance, a brand that prides itself on affordability should not venture into luxury products or vice versa. Additionally, a brand’s attributes should stay bundled within product categories: If your company sells sponges, mops would make for a great extension since both products rely on absorption and cleaning capability. If these options aren’t clear-cut, you may need to consult a Utah advertising agency for help. Don’t turn out like these brands.

Bic cologne 

Cologne is every man’s stab at sophistication, not the affordability proffered by cheap and disposable products made out of plastic like pencils and razors. 

  Bic underwear 

Bic gets two brand extensions on this list. The moral? Don’t take an office supplier and try to clothe yourself with it. 

  Cheetos lip balm 

Cheetos and lip balm are both good at ending up on your face, but Cheetos’ foray into lip balm was the biggest mistake they made. Hopefully it was not a Utah advertising agency that helped them with this one. 

  Colgate kitchen entrees 

When you think Colgate, you think toothpaste. Not the main reason why you need to have toothpaste — eating. 

NASCAR romance novels 

In an attempt to grow their female fan base, NASCAR tried being Nicholas Sparks for several years. However, this isn’t the most fertile ground for a compelling romance novel, since 80 percent of men will eventually end up paying more attention to their car than their wife or girlfriend. At least Utah digital marketing experts didn’t have to witness this mess on the Web. 

  Hooters Mastercard 

How could the awkwardness not ensue when a man frequents Hooters to utilize the card’s points program, leaving his wife at home or even worse, bringing her to the restaurant with him? 

Harley Davidson perfume 

This brand prides itself on masculinity, toughness and being a renegade. It wouldn’t be fitting to get in a bar fight over a game of pool and then spritz your neck and wrists in perfume, would it? 

Heineken shoes 

Hopefully these shoes were easy to take off. If not, plenty of college freshmen ended up binging on Heineken, falling asleep in the apartment foyer with their Heineken shoes on and consequently waking up with a face smeared in sharpie. Oops. 

James O’Connor is a writer at Fusion 360 in Salt Lake City.

[keppelandco]

Statins, open data and bad brands

A lot of men in the UK suffer from high cholesterol – normally caused by a combination of bad diet, misspent youth and genetics. I am one of them.

Most of them are prescribed statins by their GP – which are expensive drugs with occasionally alarming side effects.

(And taking statins tends to be something you do for the rest of your life – so it’s hard to understand quite why they are being handed out like sweeties).

Open data (e.g. prescribinganalytics.com) now can tell us just how much the NHS spends on statins and other drugs – and guess what: they are paying way too much for branded products. Patented statins can cost 20 times as much as generic versions.

Out of a total drug budget of £12.7bn, £400m is spent on statins. If the NHS had avoided the branded versions they would have saved £200m. (Mastodon C, Open Health Care, Goldacre).

Extrapolate that to all drugs and the British Medical Journal reckons that the NHS could save more than £1bn a year by switching from branded drugs to generic equivalents.

These are big numbers and they raise big and tricky questions for us brand people.

How justifiable is the premium for branded drugs in healthcare?

The price of Atorvastatin fell by 90% when it came off patent last year. So £9 out of every £10 of taxpayers’ money spent on that drug was a brand premium. Or in other words £9 out of £10 could have been spent treating someone else. I am not sure that any amount of argument over R&D cost and its recovery can stand up any more in the light of this. Yes R&D is expensive but does that automatically mean the cost has to be recovered through a branded premium?

What is the role of brand in healthcare?

In a constrained system (which healthcare is, along with energy, finance – and soon food) brands must play a utilitarian role. The needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few. Leveraging brands to sweat patents for a profit just doesn’t make economic sense when you look at the bigger picture – let alone the moral aspect.

Healthcare brands have to – absolutely have to – deliver identifiable positive social impact. A few are beginning to move in this direction (GsK’s DCMA unit for instance) but the majority of ‘pharma’ brands are stuck in the old model.

Will open data kill bad brands?

Intriguingly the rise of open data could wield some kind of Darwinian effect on bad brand practice. No bad thing.

If open data lets us all see where we are being fleeced at the expense of a greater social benefit we’re going to get outraged. Just as we are with Starbucks and their miniscule tax bill.

And we’ll start demanding that our precious public resources aren’t spent on unnecessary branded drugs. And regional health practices that splurge on brands will be shamed into not doing so.

At Keppel&Co we are convinced that there is no trade off necessary between positive social impact and commercial impact. But that doesn’t make us apologists for bad brand practice.

And 90% premiums on branded drugs in a health system that’s creaking at the edges is bad brand practice.

What’s needed is for one of the big pharma brands to change this game. The opportunity to turn the model on its head is huge. Nobody – but nobody – believes that sweating patents through brands is sustainable (check out Sanofi’s PE ratio now that most of its patents have expired – it went up).

One day a pharma brand is going to break ranks and change the model. Please make it soon.