Ordinary Advertising

I stumbled across an article I saved from The Wall Street Journal last spring and it got me thinking about this topic. Not just as it applies to brand names, which would be the normal purview of this site, but also in the sense of “names” as the investors who put up the money to back Lloyd’s of London are called. Because it doesn’t take much of a reach to see that a strong brand name is actually a form of insurance. Or to put it another way, as a way of avoiding the real economic cost of not having one.

And here’s an interesting case in point. However, before I launch into it, to give credit where credit is due, I am hardly the first to suggest that extraordinary advertising and the powerful brands that stem from it is a form of insurance. The Ries’s, pere and fille, do a very good job of making that argument in one of their books, entitled oddly enough “The Fall Of Advertising & The Rise Of PR.”

But I digress. To get back to the economic cost of a weak brand name, I would offer as Exhibit A this article from The Journal devoted to the struggles GE has experienced getting its Monogram line of high-end kitchen appliances to be included in the same consideration set as Wolf, Viking, Sub-Zero and Miele. And it’s not like they haven’t been trying. According to the article, GE has been at it since 1987, and invested $100MM over the last two years alone in an attempt to make some dent in the market with relatively little success thus far.

Why? Well, the article quotes Fred Albano, an appliance retailer in Pound Ridge, NY, as saying his customers are “extremely label-conscious” and tend to prefer the well-known high-end brands. Apparently to such a degree that his advice to GE for boosting Monogram sales was painfully direct: “Take the GE [name] off.”

Now there’s a fine kettle of fish. Here we have one of the largest companies in the world struggling to get a toehold in a market and to what brand does it look for inspiration, specifically when it was planning its new $3.8 “experience center” in Louisville, KY? You got it. According to the article, it studied what Harley-Davidson has done, a nice example of which you see here.

And what does HOG have, that GE doesn’t (besides a market cap approximately 3/100ths the size)? A strong brand name cultivated and nurtured through thick and thin by an almost unrivaled 15-year stretch of extraordinary advertising.

But hold on a cotton-picking second some of you may be thinking. Isn’t the GE name one of the most familiar and powerful trademarks going? Maybe on the NYSE. And maybe on the Sunday morning “opinion-leader” TV shows. But obviously not when it’s on a stove or refrigerator–with or without the ill-defined “Monogram” moniker.

A simple reality that is costing GE a fortune. And one that none of Lloyd’s “names” will underwrite insurance against. Something any decent copywriter could–with some extraordinary advertising and the powerful brand name that comes from it.