Shifting Brands: Soup vs. Soap

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Recently, I’ve just shifted brands. The Marketing/Branding at it’s essence is the same, but what I find most interesting is how different brands are… like the personalities of people, they behave differently, they act differently, they talk differently. To give you some context, I’ve moved from a Personal Care Category Brand where I was marketing soap (Lux) to a Food Category Brand (Knorr) where I’m now marketing seasonings and soup.

The brands are very different as you can imagine. I find Knorr a lot more complex than Lux simply because when it comes to food , the brands get far more personal with the consumer. This is, of course, with good reason because they are ingesting the product whereas with soap they’re not. But in terms of the brand itself, I find the consumer far more intimate when they speak of the brands they use in their cooking, etc. The level of involvement from an emotional point of view is very high.

When I was on Lux, the entire soap category can be seen to be very low involvement and so if a certain brand isn’t available in-store it’s not hard to imagine that a consumer will just pick up whatever other brand with the similar colour/smell on the shelf. Also with the recent price increases on everything in sight, low-involvement categories get the hardest hit, especially in South Africa, because the market is extremely price sensitive. AC Nielsen reports show this correlation in a lot of detail the volume drops the minute the price goes up even by 20c.

With food it’s a different matter, price sensitivity is still an issue but not as much as in the Personal Care categories. Consumers love the brands and will pay more to keep them simply because they believe and love the brand.

The variation of this dynamic is also based on the priorities of the consumer. Some people take far more interest in their personal care products and don’t really care what they eat, ad vice-versa.

Overall, it’s an interesting change and I’m enjoying using marketing skills in a different category environment and in a totally different brand. I’m sure the dynamics mentioned above would play across every single product which are available in a person’s life. But, by looking at them individually we get to see the detail behind how they work and how they affect people every single day.

Technorati Tags: Knorr, Lux, Marketing, Brands, Marketing

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