ArjunGaur @ArjunGaur: "The Making of a Brand 1...."

United Kingdom

The Making of a Brand 1. Local Village An amazing thing about life before 1850 is that most people never experienced a world more than a few dozen miles outside of their birthplace. Life was local. You ate food grown in your town. Your house was made of local lumber. Your clothes woven by a local seamstress. Bulk commodities were traded far and wide. But finished goods were a local affair. You knew the person who made them. That person was often yourself. The industrial revolution and the Civil War changed everything. Millions of people were suddenly on the move. Railroads transferred goods farther and faster than ever before. Robert Gordon writes in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: As America became more urban and as real incomes rose, the share of food and clothing produced at home declined sharply. New types of processed food were invented … Many American men had their first experience of canned food as Union soldiers during the Civil War. 2. Big Town This was one of the biggest breakthroughs in history. But it posed a problem. For the first time, consumers were disconnected from the production of their stuff. For most of history, a bad product was either your own fault, or could be taken up face-to-face with a local merchant. But canned food was batched together by dozens of regional suppliers, none of whom customers knew or could even identify. Without accountability, quality was horrendous. Harper’s Weekly wrote in 1869: “The city people are in constant danger of buying unwholesome [canned meat]; the dealers are unscrupulous, and the public uneducated.” No one knew who to trust. The William Underwood Company solved this problem. Starting as a pickle company in the 1820s, Underwood pioneered glass packing and canning. As the Civil War broke out, it supplied demand for canned meats, perfecting a meat spread it called Deviled Ham. People loved Deviled Ham. But the disparate production of canned meat gave the whole industry a reputation for inconsistency – sometimes rotten, sometimes watery, no two cans alike. 3. First Brand Underwood fixed this by creating a flaming red devil logo consumers could recognize. It added a tagline: “Branded with the devil, but fit for gods.” The logo recreated the familiarity that face-to-face commerce provided for most of history. No matter what part of the country they were in, consumers who saw the devil logo knew they were getting a specific product made by a specific company under specific quality standards. Consumers came to associate the devil logo with something they previously had none of: consistency. In 1867 Underwood took the logo to Washington and filed the first federal trademark. It was the first brand. 4. Trademarks The idea of a brand spread quickly. Kerosene took off in the late 1800s, but, like food, was inconsistent. “Good kerosene gives a light which leaves little to be desired,” wrote American Woman’s Home or Principles of Domestic Science in 1869. But it warned that impure kerosene was all too common, and could explode when lit. John D. Rockefeller tackled this problem. He named his company Standard Oil because he wanted customers to know that one can of his kerosene would be no different from the next. Companies caught on. “A mere 120 trademarks existed in 1870,” writes Gordon, “as compared to more than 10,000 registered in the year 1906 alone.” Brent Beshore, CEO of private equity firm Adventur.es, was recently asked what a brand is. He replied: Brand is the distribution of likely outcomes that you can expect from any company or person. This meshes with the forces that created the first brands. Underwood and Standard Oil were not known as the best products in the market, although both were pretty good. But they built powerful brands because consumers knew exactly what to expect from them. The distribution of likely outcomes was small. Brand wasn’t about having the highest quality. It wasn’t even about building trust. “You don’t trust the Coca-Cola brand,” Beshore said. “You know what to expect from them.” Knowing what to expect. That’s the essence of a brand. 5. Conclusion Maybe we’ll look back and realise that the best way to grow big is to have a powerful brand, and the best way to build a powerful brand is to be good all the time rather than great some of the time. What you could do to create your own Brand of Investing - Simple - Rather than betting Short Term on that extra special fail-proof business over and over again, how about getting creative and finding other Long Term Opportunities like $PLAY (Dave & Busters Entertainment Inc) $CVCO (Cavco Industries Inc) $ATGE (Adtalem Global Education Inc) $MTX (Minerals Technologies Inc) and $VIAV (Viavi Solutions) newengland.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/underwood-1906.jpg I welcome you all to look at my Portfolio and add it to your Watchlist >> I look forward to growing with all of you : )

5 Mentioned

PLAY

Dave & Busters Entertainment Inc

CVCO

Cavco Industries Inc

ATGE

Adtalem Global Education Inc

MTX

Minerals Technologies Inc

VIAV

Viavi Solutions