Spontaneous Brand Value

Last week, my flat was robbed, and to my surprise an interesting brand related observation came about.

To anyone whose home has been broken into, I'm sure you will agree it's an awful feeling - knowing someone has riffled through your things, without any consideration of the personal value you have for your possessions, picking and choosing what to take based on what they think will sell the fastest and for the highest price.

It's a horrible experience, but I couldn't help but think, "what an interesting way to gauge spontaneous brand value!"

In my case, Apple and Tiffany were clear winners of high spontaneous brand value.

The scene was strange to me, with a Louis Vuitton speedy bag, Chanel earrings and an external hard drive laying on the bed, along with my Tiffany silver key necklace on top of the chest of drawers. What wasn't there made the scene even more bizarre - surprise surprise my MacBook and iPad were gone, along with all my heirloom jewellery. Then after a couple hours of the initial shock, I realised the robbers took my empty Tiffany boxes, but left the actual Tiffany necklace on the chest of drawers!!

Wow! Talk about the power of well branded packaging! It proved to have higher spontaneous brand value than the product itself!

The famous Tiffany blue and it's iconic boxes are imbedded in people's minds around the world as a symbol of high value products that even my robbers, who are clearly not very bright, leaving Chanel boxes, let alone the jewellery, behind, assumed high return on theft based on the packaging alone - no matter what's inside, the blue box told him it's worth something.

This made me realise there's an interesting way to determine/measure brand value - ask your ideal consumers to take what ever they think has the greatest value (which would be first to sell and for the greatest amount) on first sight, from a selection of you and your competitors' products.

This then tells you if all your marketing initiatives are adequately adding up to a strong positioning and perceived value in your market.

Even though I could have done without this experience, it's always best to look for opportunities. This is why I'm going to see how long I can go without a computer, relying solely on my iPhone for all my personal computing needs, hence this post has been written on my iPhone this afternoon :)


Chat soon,
Nik