One's kind of a quick hit. Except that it took 30 years to come up with.
The other, we'll be discussing more over the next several posts.
The quick thought.
We market to make sales. We brand to maintain margins.
The longer thought.
If you took marketing courses in school - and I never did - you learned about the four Ps that supposedly fall under its umbrella:
- Product.
- Price.
- Promotion.
- Place (meaning distribution).
Only, I think a lot of contemporary businesses would take issue with that set. The definition hardly leaves room for engineering and operations. Not to mention finance.
But I would suggest that the part of product development that has to do with packaging and bundling specific items and services is not only a function of marketing but also has a big effect on a company's brand.
Which lands it right in the purview of the branding consultant.
More and more, rearranging the product lineup and packaging it is a big part of what this branding firm does to help our clients establish premium positioning in their markets.
As we've all seen in the international marketplace, sometimes those product bundles wind up creating not just new positioning but reinventing entirely new product categories.
Take a look at Apple in that regard, for instance.
But even stopping short of the full-on category reinvention, pulling together more valuable product and service bundles can help any business make real money. It can:
- Capture new sources of revenue.
- Bring in that new revenue at higher margins.
- Widen margins with new, high-value offerings in current markets.
- Maintain margins on current revenue sources - even when the competition is trying to start a price war.
Of course, delivering on the promises implied in those high-value bundles is critical - just like delivering on the promises the existing brand already makes.