Two weeks ago, both my boys caught colds. When bedtime came, I
looked for some medicine to give them. We have lots of medicines.
Heaps. I have a whole shelf in a kitchen cupboard that we call “the
medicine chest” where you can hardly reach for one bottle without
another falling out.
So I found plenty of cold meds for kids. I found nine bottles of
the CVS knockoff of Robitussin. Not one was the same. Not one was
the kind I was looking for, for colds at night. Just now I went
looking for those nine bottles, and I see my wife has either thrown
six of them away or done what I threatened to do at the time and
simply poured them all together into a couple of big bottles and
said the heck with it. Take my word. We had Tussin DM, Tussin
Wide-Awake, Tussin 3.0, Tussin Sport Utility, Tussin Luxus, we had
nine fully different kinds of Tussin.
This confusion comes to us courtesy of the “high-mix,
low-volume” revolution in manufacturing. Henry Ford used to say you
could have any color Model T you wanted as long as it was black.
About 1980, a man from then-Arthur Andersen Consulting explained to
me that computer-aided design and manufacture (CAD and CAM) made it
possible to “give people exactly what they wanted.” You could
configure a manufacturing line to produce dozens of variants of the
same thing, from computer printers to eyeglass frames, virtually
without regard to quantity or economies of scale.
The advertising guys said, “Wow! Let’s show people how many
things they could want!” And the marketing gurus thought,
“My, my, my. Let’s eat up our competitors’ shelf space.” And so it
came to pass, and the market looked upon it and said, This is
good.
Except when you shop for deodorant, say, and all you want is to
smell the same way you smelled last time, and find out you can’t
anymore, because your old one, you know, it was orange with a green
stripe, has morphed into a dozen slightly varying demi-clones.
Maybe clones don’t morph. Never mind. You know what I mean. Brand
sprawl.
Laundry detergent, okay? How many different kinds are there of
just a single brand? The official website of Procter and Gamble’s
Tide (www.tide.com; be sure to visit, it’s a jaw-dropper)
lists Tide Liquid, Tide Powder, Tide With Bleach, Tide With Bleach
Alternative, Tide HE, Tick Kick, Tide Stainbrush, and Tide Buzz.
(Do you smoke it or snort it?) I know there are more, because I’ve
seen them. Tide unscented is available, for example, in both liquid
and powder versions.
I buy the cheapest, biggest bottle of liquid detergent I find at
any given time. Lots of people probably do the same. It makes me
wonder if the overall effect of all that choice is to make us
refuse to choose: Screw it, I’ll buy the biggest. A significant
number of consumers may well have been moved out of the most
desirable of advertising research categories, brand preference and
brand insistence. (B.P.: “I want Pepsi. No Pepsi? Well, okay,
Coke.” B.I.: “No Pepsi? Okay, I’ll go someplace else to get it.”)
And into that advertising limbo, brand indifference.
What’s more, burgeoning variety could move some buyers into
categories like brand aversion or brand rejection. Some
commercials, like those for Vehix.com, suggest that advertisers
worry about that.
Brand sprawl, in other words, may have begun to erode brand
differentiation, that most cherished objective of the imperfect art
known as advertising. (“I know half my ad dollar is wasted; I just
don’t know which half.”) And I’m sure the busy brains at ad agency
research departments run studies about it all the time.
Not that brand sprawl shows any sign of stopping. Nor will it,
so long is there’s shelf space to dominate. And “mind share” for
agencies to sell to advertisers.
Unfortunate fallout prevails at places like Dunkin’ Donuts.
There, a profusion of bagel and croissant sandwiches and fancy
drinks like Chocolate Coolatta and Butterscotch Cappucino suggest a
high-mix low-volume factory behind it all. But no. Just “mind
share” competition with Starbucks. And increasingly frazzled
counter people, running to put together orders like Henry Ford’s
old Model T assembly men while the rest of us wait for fast food
which is no longer fast at all.
