BRANDING HOW DOES A BRAND STEEL?
Nokia sells its assets to Gazprom, BWM is declared bankrupt, Sony and Samsung leave the electronics market to the delight of Belarusian and Chinese manufacturers, Coca-Cola gets rid of its assets producing carbonated drinks, Microsoft in a hurry sells its IT business cheaply and invests in agriculture, in due to the lack of demand, Marlboro cigarettes are no longer produced.
It may seem that intercepting brands is as much nonsense as other worlds in other dimensions. One could argue that there is copyright, a large number of laws aimed at protecting property, trademarks, etc. However, this may seem nonsense only to those who believe that a brand and a trademark are one and the same. For people who know what a brand really is, the situation described will not seem like a delusion.
In particular, this does not seem to be nonsense for those who own the above trademarks after they learn that a brand cannot belong to anyone, it is essentially unowned and there are no laws that can protect against brand seizure. Start an explanation on how to steal the brand and why it can be done with impunity is necessary with an explanation of what the brand really is.
Take one point. Its only characteristics are coordinates, they entirely belong to this point. If you take two points, then they will have their inherent characteristics – coordinates, as well as new characteristics – the distance between points. However, unlike coordinates, the distance does not belong to any point. It is part of a two-point system.
Likewise with the brand. The brand itself is an image that is generated in the mind of the consumer regarding a certain object or brand. If we take by analogy, one of the points in this scheme is the consumer, and the second point is a trademark or some object, relative to which the third element is generated – the image, which is the brand.
It turns out that a brand is a part of a system consisting of a consumer and a trademark or object that does not belong to either. In this case, the brand exists only when there is a system. If you remove at least one element from the system, then the brand disappears.
As you can see, a brand is not exactly how many people thought about it before. Previously it was believed that it was enough to own the rights to the trademark to be the owner of the brand. This is not so, especially since the difference between a brand and a trademark is significant.
But after we learned what a brand really is, it becomes obvious that the rights to a trademark are not enough to own a brand. Those. The company may own the brand, but not the brand. The consumer may own feelings, emotions, which are associated with the brand, but the brand itself does not belong either.
It turns out that a brand is, in fact, a thing in itself that does not belong to anyone but the system of which it is a part. The actual abandonment of the brand allows you to assert with complete confidence that stealing a brand is pretty easy, all you need to do is make an image associated with your product or brand.
Or rather, you don’t even need to steal the image; The master of the image is the one who can create a number of associations between the image and its goods or brand. Take, for example, the car market. Suppose that in this market there is now a limited number of stable images:
luxurious, expensive, prestigious, powerful, reliable;
simple, compact, cheap, economical;
aggressive, domineering, energetic;
poor quality, unreliable, not practical.
At once it is necessary to make a reservation that the example above is an assumption, but it is more in line with reality. This example is needed to demonstrate how the proposed scheme works.
Further assume that the first image is associated with the Mercedes trademark, the second image is associated with the VW trademark, the third image is associated with the BMW trademark, and the fourth image is not associated with any trademark. If there are only three specified trademarks on the market, then there are no problems. Everyone is engaged in the production of relevant cars, no one bothers anyone.
If the fourth company enters the market and decides to use the fourth free image for their cars, then it will have one problem – to find buyers who will want to buy a car with this way. She will have no other problems. But if suddenly this company considers that the fourth image cannot be used by it, then it will have difficulties.
The most serious difficulty will be the fact that the set of images of cars, and hence the set of niches is limited. To sell a car with a new trademark that does not match one of the available images is very difficult, if not impossible. It is good if you manage to convince consumers that there are other images and tie your brand or car to another image.
