Branding

What About Brands?

Many years ago, I wrote a Market Watch column on branding.  I opined that the importance of brands might be declining in the action sports world as products became reliable and similar.  My friend and, at that time, editor Sean O’Brien at Transworld thought enough of it to immediate publish it online without telling me.  […]

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Maybe Not Being a Brand Is a Brand

We believe in the power of brands.  We have to.  In action sports/active outdoor, there are very few “moats” around products.  That is, there are few distinguishing product features not based on marketing that are sustainable and even long-established brand names run into difficulties holding onto their market positions.  Witness Nike’s current struggles. Years ago,

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The Potential Downside of Successful Brand Building in an Online World?

Branding, they tell me, is all about building a relationship between a customer and a brand.  That customer, theoretically, will have a bias towards your brand that encourages less consideration of alternatives, more purchases and, hopefully, less price sensitivity.  That’s the theory anyway. It was, most of us would probably agree, a pretty good theory. 

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The Role of Store Brands

I came across this short article recently talking about the ongoing improvement in store brands and their importance to retailers. Now, it’s not our industry but I thought everything they said applies to us. I guess the standard explanation for store brands is that they give the retailer some more margin. True, and that margin

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