Labels: Combatting copycat packaging with complex codes
March 24th, 2010 by Staff Reporter“For food products, a price driven market is still fuelling the massive growth in ‘own brand’ ranges. However, another influential factor everyone should be paying attention to is the growing desire by savvy consumers to understand the hidden truth behind what they’re buying beyond the labels – whether a product is healthy and an ethical choice. A yoghurt is a yoghurt is a yoghurt no longer rings true when considering its organic credentials, its salt and sugar content and origin of ingredients.
It’s almost inevitable that legal copycat packaging battles will continue to flare up this year, but we will also see brands trying new strategies to curb the impact of own brand products on their sales. The Premier Food ‘great ideas’ strategy, which focuses on cooking from scratch, will help create more depth to the brands within the group. We are already seeing similar campaigns from other groups such as Unilever in a return to authenticity and provenance and “the way mama used to make it”. Knorr for example has successfully tapped into this with its stockpots being the core ingredient of hearty family meals, touching on the emotional aspect.
There is a limit to functional differentiation with commodity brands. For example, there’s little scope beyond ‘full-fat’, ‘semi-skimmed’ and ‘fat-free milk’. Trade brands enjoy a much richer store of emotional equity that give them greater leverage in the hearts and minds of their consumers.
Trade brands also have a huge opportunity in the area of innovation. By tapping into their established brand equity and utilising rich consumer insight, they can invest in products that have strong differentiations from the market. Being forward thinking and looking at wider national and global trends will also help brands take market share back from own label. For example, we are seeing a growth in the ageing population, so brands must think about what adaptations would make their products appealing to this demographic, such as making packaging both easy access and easy to dispose.
In packaging, brands need to protect their equity by establishing new codes of design, style and tone of voice that are sufficiently complex, ownable and demonstrate the depth of the brand – whether that’s CSR, innovation or point of difference. By making these codes more complex, it becomes much harder for copy-cat products to get a free ride off established brands’ equity.”
– Dave Brown, UK Chairman, The Brand Union