and IKEA create emotional charges and experiences that go
well beyond their products (and incidentally, the spend on
advertising by such companies rose in the otherwise bleak
advertising days of 1991). Note the retailers in the list; the
sellers of ‘no brands’ were becoming brands in their own right.
Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks, sums it up: ‘The people
who line up for Starbucks aren’t just there for the coffee.’ It
might seem that the old model can still be applied to Starbucks
– the core is a cup of coffee, the surround is the environment,
the other customers, the location, etc. But the new breed of
brand managers have tended to use their thought process in the
other direction – finding products to fit a brand concept, rather
than building layers on top of a product.
Does it make a difference which way round you think? For
sure, and some brands have gone on to break ‘the product and
the surround’ mould altogether, deciding that the manufacture
of the product itself becomes less and less relevant. Tommy
Hilfiger makes no products. It is run entirely on licensing agree-
ments with products made by a range of commissioned suppli-
ers, very often in South-East Asia.
Such new business and brand models raise many questions.
Must a brand that tries to embrace a complete lifestyle be
rooted in a business model that can itself sit happily within that
lifestyle? Can a brand that might ooze with notions of libera-
tion and well-being be based on exploitation at its source?
More than this, can brands be created that exist free of any
reference to the corporate body that creates and manages them?
The argument is not so dissimilar (though less extreme perhaps)
to the old one about painters and composers – could you love a
painting or a concerto produced by a murderer? It depends on
whether we know, and there are many out there determined
that we should.
Where brands came from… and why that matters
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