Bruegger’s will offer its New York-style, hot-from-the-oven red, white, and blue swirled bagels on July 3rd and 4th to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday and help the men and women of the Armed Forces and their families.
Recent trends show that many of the leading consumer-products companies are reacting more quickly and more frequently to the need for product revitalization and investing in brand packaging.
If you’ve been to the supermarket or chain pharmacy lately, you may have noticed those shelves are getting quite crowded. More and more choices, in every conceivable flavor, color and smell, assault the shopper’s senses and make it difficult to choose. Consumer-products companies know they need to update their packaging if they hope to achieve higher visibility. But for those companies who rebrand or repackage too often, this can have the opposite effect, raising suspicion in the consumer’s mind.
When sales begin to grind to a halt, it’s generally assumed that there is some type of disconnect between what the consumer wants and what the company thinks the consumer wants. Is the solution rebranding? Repackaging? New advertising? Cutting advertising? It’s important to know to avoid wasting resources.
Yet, how often do companies perform only a superficial search to uncover the problem? It’s painful to look inward. It’s much easier to hire a consultant. But what’s often needed is to dig deep, assessing and reassessing company policies, common practices, issues related to customer care, and the value of the actual product.
Even more important than gathering all of these metrics is to understand and know how to react to the customer’s experience with your brand and the customer’s perception about whether your brand is meeting its promises. All companies, whether online, offline, big or small, still rely on people—customers—for success. If the answers to these questions are “no”, all the advertising, repackaging and rebranding you can afford will make about as much difference as putting a band-aid on a shark bite.
