Selling on someone else’s brand
Brand Piracy
Effective branding, the development of a brand can help in many ways in marketing of products. As I was walking in the mall with a colleague of mine from work and came across a shop of YSL or Yves Saint-Laurent which is one of the very popular brands of designer clothing and other fashion accessories. And he told me, he said he can’t remember where he read it, but he said their prices have dropped since their products are hard to sell due to a lot of sellers of fake YSL products. And I did agree that there are a lot of fakes products of YSL since from the country where I came from and grew up, these fake products were everywhere although they may look like the real thing, there were of cheaper quality, thus sold cheaper as well. And people that bought it was mainly for the brand recognition, the prestige of having a YSL product even if it was fake. The YSL brand is known to be quite expensive and having one seemed to be like a sign of prestige, that some people even go to the extent of buying fake cheap low quality ones just to carry the prestige with them using products like a status symbol. But in some cases, I have seen a different story in playing with brands.
Brand Image Copying
I grew up in the Philippines and for orange juice, I drink Tang. Until out from nowhere, a brand called 8 o’clock comes out. Having a career that started out as a chemist, I still remember some early days of applying for jobs and one of them was at a company called SugarLand who made the product 8 o’clock. During those days the office I went to was in the territory of many Filipino-Chinese businessmen near Binondo, Manila, but where I went was slightly nearby, at Tondo. And the office I went to did not look presentable at all from the outside. Although the inside was nice and clean, it still did not look like a nice office that time.
The original packaging of 8 o’clock, as far as I remember was predominantly in orange packaging. And as I was growing up, I was starting to see it have more green in the packaging similar to Tang’s packaging. Could you say this is copying? Maybe not, maybe it is. Since people do study the effect of color on sales and experiment on it. I still remember a seminar I attended once at an expo on graphics, where one of the presenters told us that Tide the soap once tried using the color blue instead of the bright red-orange. And sales went down and decided to put it back to the original color and sales went back up.
From the last time I remember, my last look at 8 o’clock orange juice’s packaging. The colors look very much like Tang. And I see this all the time in many other products. I have also noticed this with the milk brands Anlene and Anchor. They have similar fonts and sometimes in the grocery store, you see them right beside each other and they look similar, but just differ in color where Anlene is light green and Anchor is blue. Aside from that, the rest looks very similar.
Actual examples with TopCare products
After going to the grocery store, I noticed a brand called TopCare. This is what I have previously used for my anti-dandruff shampoo since it was a bit cheaper than Head and Shoulders. They seemed to have the same active ingredient I believe but their packaging looked very similar. But after trying it out, I went back to Head and Shoulders since I believe I got more itchiness and I feel more stinging sensations when using TopCare. But in my last grocery visit, I started to take more note of each product and their differences. Check the series of photos I took and tell me if this is really some serious brand research or simply brand copying.
