The big deal with brand names

Here’s an idea for a cool business. Collect 100 empty bottles, clean them thoroughly, seal them and put this label on them “Antelope Air- the best air in Kigali.” If you have good advertising skills, you will get someone buying your air and if your business booms, you will get competitors. That just demonstrates how far people will go to buy anything regardless of its value but just of its label. If you’ve taken a close look at some international fashion shows, you have probably seen some pathetic outfits being displayed, but because the label is popular, the demand for the outfit has gone over the roof. People buy what they see in music videos or magazines, not because it really suits them, but because it’s what their coveted celebrities are going to be wearing too. You go to places and people are not eager to find out what you are reading, what you are thinking, but how you’re dressed. Is it a Gucci? A Dolce and Gabbana? From then on, to them you will either be someone they can term as an up to date modern person, or if not labeled, a villager just from his garden. “Women dress alike all over the world. They dress to be annoying to other women.” Fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli couldn’t have said it better about women’s desire to look classy and fabulous. It is actually said that when two unfamiliar women meet on a street and they are wearing the same dress, from then on, they become sworn enemies. However, this theory of ‘the label’ has no age limit and is not in the littlest sense gender sensitive, it cuts across the globe attacking both the rich who stack up expensive original labels and the poor deep in the village who consume all the fakes on the market. The other day I was wondering, what if all clothes, perfumes and accessories were to be made plain without labels; would they still fetch as much attention? If that happened, wouldn’t we gallop both Pepsi and Coca-Cola as if they were one without recognizing the difference? Even if Turbo King and Primus are literally the same products, you will find loyalists to either one of the brands having a strong ten points argument showing why his preferred brand is super-perfect compared to the other. So, just as you can imagine, this thought got me nowhere. People’s quench to always look awesome and modern is always up there in the sky. So market competitors are left to be innovative, cunning and in most cases deceitful so as to attract the most customers. The most successful brands have also created another problem for society. Illegal manufacturers have come up with very poor quality clone products, branded them the popular label and flooded them on the market. The unsuspecting buyer discovers only too late that he actually didn’t purchase his coveted brand of accessory but a fake. Consciously or unconsciously, we are living in the label world, brought about by genius economists who know how to market and advertise their product, always on the verge of inventing a new design just to push them one step ahead of their competitors. All they have to do is produce as many different products and put the same logo on them. This is because they are quite sure of the loyalty you as the consumers bestow them just because of nothing else but their name. Ends