The key trends:

The Mintel headline claims “Private label gets a quality reputation, causing consumers to change their buying habits.” The truth is that behavior lags far [...]]]> Mintel, a global market intelligence company, recently released a study touting growing consumer acceptance of generic, private label, and retailer brands. Yet what people say does not always affect what people do.

The Mintel headline claims “Private label gets a quality reputation, causing consumers to change their buying habits.” The truth is that behavior lags far behind though. Mintel found that 44% of shoppers believe the quality of store brands has improved over the last five years.  Only 19% of shoppers believe brands are worth paying more for. Between 56 and 62% of shoppers (depending on category) believe there is no quality difference between name brand and store brand products. If people acted on their beliefs, store brands and generics would have a 30%+ market share in most grocery categories.

Actual sales figures tell a different story. According to Packaged Facts published in Packaging Digest, private label accounts for only 17% of total food and beverage retail sales in the United States. Recession pressures on shopper budgets has driven an increase since 2008 of 7% for food and 1% in beverages, yet generic/private label/retail brand share of market tracks nowhere near shopper opinions. While some categories, like sugar, are perceived as commodities with generics having a greater market share, and other categories, like milk, have few dominant national brands, most categories are still dominated by national name brands.

Marketers know that behavior is only partly driven by stated opinion. Habits, specifics of the situation, other opinions, marketing messages, and dozens of other influences impact buying decisions. Having an increasingly positive opinion about generic brands and store brands does not mean shoppers buy more of them.

It appears Facebook Connect is succeeding where others have failed (most notably Microsoft’s Passport product). They are becoming the default internet ID card, saving users from having to create user names and passwords for every site they interact with.

Facebook Connect’s success is partly due [...]]]> More and more Web sites are offering the “Connect with Facebook” option.

It appears Facebook Connect is succeeding where others have failed (most notably Microsoft’s Passport product). They are becoming the default internet ID card, saving users from having to create user names and passwords for every site they interact with.

Facebook Connect’s success is partly due to the fact that many people don’t understand Facebook’s many security flaws, partly because people really do want to share articles and commentary with their friends, and partly because site owners are happy to outsource their identity login systems and push Facebook Connect. Microsoft’s Passport never enjoyed these adoption drivers.

Yet how far will Facebook Connect go before it hits the same brick wall that stopped Microsoft?

Trust will be the ultimate limiting factor. Facebook makes constant security blunders. Just this last weekend, they enabled third party partners to access users’ private information without giving users clear notice and without explicitly allowing users to control access. ZDNet reported this latest bungle with the tongue-in-cheek observation, “I know I want the likes of FarmVille, and all their partners, to have my home address and phone number.”

More than likely, Facebook Connect will work fine in social settings, but won’t gain any traction in commercial settings. It is one thing for a hacker to break into your Huffington Post identity, but quite another for them to access all your bank accounts. The Facebook brand just has too many well-deserved trust problems.

(If you seek to thwart Facebook attempts to exploit your private information, read ZDNet’s advice in their Definitive Facebook Lockdown Guide.)

Read more on Facebook brand trust problems

Steve Jobs [...]]]> How much of the Apple brand equity is Steve Jobs? Is the brand at risk with Jobs’ new medical leave? When a major brand is closely tied to a single person (think of Yves St. Laurent, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump), brand value can rise and fall on the fortunes and failures of that person.

Steve Jobs is an iconic figure in technology and culture. When he holds up a gadget at any event, everyone oohs and aahs. Yes, the Apple brand is about cool design, but it is also about the guy that invented computing as we know it in a garage in Cuppertino. Jobs’ spectacular successes and instructive failures have given him status and credibility that can’t be matched. Apple without Steve Jobs has the potential to remain a cool company, but it could just as easily fall to the low profitability, declining sales and sinking stock price of the John Sculley era.

MarketWatch talks of the “Jobs Premium” in the share price of Apple stock. Apple shares fell 50% in 2008 when it was rumored Jobs’ pancreatic cancer had returned. They suffered a similar fall in January 2009 when he took a leave of absence for a liver transplant. On the immediate heels of his latest announcement of another medical leave, share value dropped 6.45% and has been shaky since.

What can Apple do? I certainly hope that Steve Jobs comes back from medical leave fit and healthy. Yet Apple, like any valuable brand, must face the fact that we all face the same unavoidable end some time. Here are three options:

1. Institutionalize the legacy of the person. Coco Chanel has been dead for decades, but her personal brand has become iconic and her spirit still infuses Chanel. Calving Klein is attempting to make the same transformation in his own company, while he is still alive to enjoy it. Orville Redenbacher has become a character, much like Colonel Sanders.
2. Find a successor. Frank Purdue found another tough man behind a tender chicken, in the person of his equally winsome son. Perry Ellis was succeeded by superstar Marc Jacobs.
3. Diversify.  Build on a strong personal legacy by adding additional attributes. Martha Stewart is less and less about Martha and more and more about design. She no longer appears on the cover of every issue and additional designers, like Kevin Sharkey, are sharing some of the spotlight. Condé Nast Publications continued and even thrived after the death of founder and driving force Condé Montrose Nast by focusing on high-end, glossy publications that set the standard for their categories.

More on brands tied to people–Celebrity Endorsers

The brand [...]]]> Burson-Marsteller released a study that claims 76% of blogs were off message. They analyzed more than 150 messages sent out by companies listed  in the Financial Times Global 100 and discovered a large gap between the official brand messages and how they were reflected on blogs, in tweets, and on other social media posts.

The brand message problems stem from a number of deficiencies by corporate marketing operations including:

1) Having no clear plan or objectives for communications on the social Web. An example here: Ziploc: Boring Doesn’t Work as a Social Media Engagement Strategy

2) Failure to understand that how social media is used is as important as what is said. More detail here:  Social Media Brand Engagement Rules:  Toyota vs Chevrolet

3) Failing to have a social media policy. A great library of social media policy examples from companies large and small that you can freely access, download, and adapt can be found here.

4) Not providing communicators outside of the marketing department with writing guidelines to explain how to write freely, but still stay “on brand.” This example from Diebold explains the brand’s voice. Diebold’s Branded Voice Guidelines. At Merriam Associates, we also include example messages so that people can see guidelines come to life (and re-use pre-written, pre-approved content.)

5) Lack of adequate control–things get “published” without enough oversight or double-checking. Once something is “out” it can’t be pulled back “in”. This article Viral Marketing Making Your Brand Sick is one example as is this mistake from Target from Halloween.

The head of the State Council Information Office, Wang Chen says there is no stopping its campaign against offensive [...]]]> ZD Net is reporting today that China has censored some 60 thousand Websites (really thought it would be more) and over 350 million pages and is “proud of it”. MerriamAssociates.com is honored to be one of them.

The head of the State Council Information Office, Wang Chen says there is no stopping its campaign against offensive material (was it a tasteless picture or two, the nude Twitter followers post, or the frank commentary about branding and China on this site that got it banned?) Chen claims to have gone through 1.79 million websites, deleting 350 million pages and to have rounded up 4,965 people in China, “1,332 of whom received ‘criminal punishment’ with 58 jailed for five years or more.” They can’t get to me here in the US, thankfully, even though I posted two Bimbo articles.

Chinese officials are foolish to be proud of this achievement in censorship, not because it is counter to our own particular American values (which are not relevant in China), but because they hobble China’s long-term capacity as an economic and political power. In a Web 3.0 world where “information wants to be free” and where viral communication, social media, open source sharing, crowd-sourcing and community-powered technology and process improvements are driving innovation and growth, censorship is a dead weight for China. China’s huge production engine will stay subservient to the world’s innovator brands as long as the Chinese government prevents the free flow of information that could empower brilliant Chinese minds and make future leaders.