The Hidden Dangers Of Over-Branding

Strategist Graham Button has written a great piece at Co.Design that explores the problems of over-branding, and explains how too many trivial, low quality choices can drag down the quality of life of the consumer. He also outlines a number of ideas to help remedy the situation.

Consumers are obese, but not in the way you might think. They’re over-served and over-branded. They’re stuffed to the gills with logos.

The average U.S. supermarket, one right down the road from you, sells as many as 50,000 products. There are 16 varieties of Tropicana Pure Premium juices alone, for example, and PepsiCo will probably up it to 30 before long. That’s over-service. We don’t need it.

Recently, BlackBerry introduced Super Apps, apps that do what any app does, only a hair better. Here we go again. Another gold-platinum-titanium product cycle: Brands punching it out over incremental differences as if those tweaks were game changers. That’s branding a service to the customer that isn’t really a service at all; it’s just the natural evolution of things.

Co.Design: “Over-Branding Kills Profits And Scares Off Consumers”