Product Superiority: Myth or Fact? (1)

A couple of Saturdays back, I ended up spending entirely what should otherwise have been a restful day holed up at a popular spare-parts market in Ikeja (name withheld) which also doubles as part – mechanic garage, part – ‘pimp-my-ride’ shop. While waiting for a solution to the automotive challenge which took me there in the first place, in between I got intrigued by the sheer ingenuity of our local auto whiz kids. I wondered why the first made-in-Nigeria automobile remains an unrealized dream, despite all the expertise and ‘components’ at their disposal. I was particularly intrigued by a particular gentleman (who I presume had also come to fix his vehicle), who had set out to engage and as a matter of fact, seemed to have captured the attention of a good number of the spare-part dealers (and practically anyone else who cared to listen!) with his authoritative assertions about the peculiarities of various automobile brands.
“Toyota vehicles are far better than Honda”, he confidently declared. “Honda is trying, but forget it…it’s still yet to catch up with Toyota, its ‘elder’ brother”, he continued!
From my vintage position, I continued listening with interest to the growing cacophony of voices howbeit amused as each contributor to the heated discourse aired their own perspective with equal measure of authoritativeness.
Days after this experience, I however still found my mind drifting back to the import of those exchanges that day at the mechanic’s workshop. In reality, is Toyota really a better brand than Honda (or vice-versa)? Or is Nike a remarkably better shoe than Reebok? How remarkably different is a Pirelli tyre from its rubbery counterpart onto which the brand-name Michelin has been stamped? In fact, who really knows, anyway?
Each of these brands has an ardent band of loyalists and I’m even more positive that if you posed the same questions to the brand custodians at Toyota and Pirelli, they’ll have streams of empirical data and figures that are meant to justify why their products are supposed to be the best in their respective categories.
To the “layman”, the average tyre buyer, is the Pirelli all that different from the competition after-all? Perhaps, if you take the available brand indicators of competing brands, would you truly be able to discern which is made of longer-lasting material or which guarantees better performance?
This is all the more interesting when you consider that both the Nike shoe and its Reebok counterpart are both made in some South-East Asian sweatshop by cheap labour who probably earn less than two dollars a day for their toil (this actually became a psychic cost to Nike a couple of years back!)
So, question is, why do you and I go to lengths that are sometimes unimaginable to spend outrageous amounts of money on products from these companies? The Interbrand ratings of global brands released periodically give further insight on the enormous potentials inherent in branding. The global value of the Coca-Cola brand, for instance now runs into hundreds of billions of US dollars. And mark you, that figure is the estimated value of its brand alone, exclusive of the trucks, bottling plants, even its legendary secret formula!
Let’s briefly look at a few key elements that these megabrands consistently imbibe and evaluate themselves against:

Added Value:
Every brand is worth something, and even the Coca-Colas of this world did not assume multi-billion dollar status in a jiffy. Now, the better the branding efforts, the more value a ‘brand’ can confer on the products and services to which it’s attached. The steps to building a strong brand are however not cast in stone. For instance, if you and I were to each write a rational description of our favourite brands, let me use Coca-Cola (because its about the most universal a brand can get!) as an example, we would probably make use of different words, but our statements tend to be fairly similar in meaning, and that’s because the brand Coca-Cola is so well-established in our minds that we really needn’t give it any spectacular thought to be able to arrive at fairly similar descriptions of this brand.
However, in practice, people just don’t set out diagramming the meaning behind brands. Somehow attributes such as the logo, name, colours etc, instantly bring to mind a perception built by years of branding cues which range from product design to packaging and other elements. For Coke, one remarkable cue will surely be the ubiquitous contour bottle that has become a form of braille, in addition to brand communication via advertising, promotions, public relations et al.
I quote the words of Jeremy Bullmore, “We (consumers) build an image as birds build nests from the scraps and straws we chance upon”. Going by these realizations, the trick for any long term branding efforts therefore is to endeavour to focus not on the branding cues themselves first but on the benefits they communicate to the consumer. For Coke, it’s ‘refreshment’ as the primary rational benefit. For the Volvo brand of automobiles, it’s unmistakably safety.