"Perge modo et qua te ducit via dirige gressum," said Venus to Aeneas.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Un-Branding
This is a brilliant business decision. Say you've got all this coffee to sell. Say your staff is trapped in an annoying process that makes your customers dissatisfied. Say your coffee is overpriced and your business is overextended. Why wait for your competition to eat your lunch? You just pour your coffee into new cups and become your own competition. Because the fact is that your coffee is basically good; its your whole delivery system that got out of whack.
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4 comments:
Makes good business sense to me. Is it sneaky? Maybe, but who said there were any rules against that?
It's a very common business strategy: OWN the entire category. Just look at any of the hotel brands and the multiple tiers and price points they offer among their various properties/brands. I'm actually surprised Starbucks didn't do it a long time ago.
Jeffrey, this is slightly different from owning the category. In this instance, the self-generated competition points to the failure of the mother brand and eats its lunch (and drinks it coffee, as it were).
The mother brand is hardly failing judging by the quarterly sales just reported. Struggling yes. Burt failing? Definitely not.
And yes, it is somewhat different than owning the category, but it is similar in spirit. Create different environments featuring the same basic product in different forms and capture as many sales as you possibly can.
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