Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #12

Marketing Mix: Product / Service Guide #12:  For a marketer with a multi-brand portfolio, the goal should be to make each brand the number one brand for their target customers.

When you took your economics courses in undergraduate school, you probably learned that the monopolistic competition market model was the closest approximation of the U.S. “free market” system (whatever “free market” means).  I’ve always thought the the phrase “monopolistic competition” was applicable to a marketer’s view of the U.S. market system.  There is very definitely competition between the brands in a given product category and each of those brands is attempting to gain enough share within the category to have some monopoly control of the category. 

Economists make the assumption that goods are readily substitutional for one another, but marketers attempt to ensure that their brands are not readily substitutional.  Marketers attempt to claim a unique brand benefit that satisfies some internal want/need in consumer marketing or satisfies economic need in business-to-business marketing.  They attempt to convince the buyer that only their brand will provide this unique brand benefit.  If they are successful with some of their target customers, they have created some degree of monopoly power. 

As an example, I’ll return to one of the consumer brands that I admire, Gatorade.  Gatorade through marketing has established itself as the brand for winners; drink Gatorade and you’ll be a winner.  By default, consumers who drink another brand of sports drinks must not be winners.  In the sports drink category, only Gatorade provides this unique brand benefit.  The human want/need that is satisfied is the ego need of winning, a need that is never completely fulfilled especially in males.  The result is that Gatorade has established some degree of monopoly power among target consumers who want to be winners.

In the laundry detergent category, Proctor & Gamble’s Tide brand is by far the market leader with about a 40% category share.  Across the entire U.S. market, Tide is the number one brand.  One would have to have access to Tide’s brand positioning document to understand the exact market segment being targeted and the positioning of the brand.  Taking a guess, I would say that it has something to do with target consumers wanting a hard working cleaning.  Given its overall category share, I would assume that Tide is the number one brand with its target market.

However, P&G recognizes that there are market segments other than the one at which Tide is being targeted.  In P&G’s Web site, they list six brands in their detergent portfolio: Bold, Cheer, Dreft, Era, Gain, and Tide. It would be my belief that each of these brands is targeted at a unique market segment.  Moreover, it’s possible that each of these brands is the number one brand in its respective target market.  One of these market segments must be concerned about color fading and color transfer.  To address the needs of this market segment P&G offers Cheer … “Dirt Goes.  Color Stays.”  Cheer may well be the number one brand for its target customers.

So the learning point for you multi-brand marketers is to attempt to make each of your brands the number one brand for its respective target customers.