How to Use the Reputation of Big Brands to Grow Your Own?

Understanding the Basics

Reputation alone could be treated as the single most important trait in building a brand!

What People Associate a company with?

How do people perceive a Company normally?

It’s all Reputation

All businesses protect it with their Heart and Soul.

But why are we discussing reputation? Aren’t we here to discuss how we can create Viral Advertisements?

Let’s try to understand it with Case studies.

True Monopoly Failing

From 2010 to 2016, Gillette’s market share dropped from 70%, as an absolute monopoly, to 54%. During the same time, Dollar Shave Club amassed 3.5 Million Subscribers, generating revenue of 200 Million Dollars. They must have a great product to support these numbers. Umm…not really Dollar shave club’s products were by no means superior to Gillette’s. For knowledge, they didn’t even manufacture their own devices.

If it was not the product, then how did they do it? They leveraged the Reputation of Gillette by creating mocking advertisements, targeting the pain points of Gillette users, they presented their product as a solution. The ad went like this

“Do you like spending 20 Dollars a month on a company named razor just because Some Celebrity said to use it?

Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle? and so on..”

And it worked!! It went viral Amassing millions of views. And in less than 24 hours, Dollar shave club got over 10,000 subscriptions. And they kept repeating it till 2016 before getting acquired by Unilever for whopping 1 Billion Dollars.

Gillette brand already had a name associated with Men shaving, so using their name itself put Dollar Shave Club remembrance with it. And when they pointed out pain points so customers and promised to solve these with their product, they had their golden sauce for success.

Hearing Problems People genuinely find, put Dollar Shave Club in Public mind as a Consumer-centric business

Similarly, in the 1800s, Barnum wanted to buy a museum sold to Pearl because he had a better Reputation. Barnum turned the whole Public against Peral by critiquing him aggressively for being inexperienced to run a museum, saying he would ruin it, which did work In favour of Barnum.

So we have to mock our competition? Is that all? Just mock them, and we have the perfect recipe for success. Not really

It was okay for Dollar Shave Club to do it as they were new and had no risk. But if well-established companies do it, It’s not the best path to go down. Outright slander and insult are too strong at this point; they are ugly and may hurt you more than help you.

Edison did this and failed miserably, even hurting his Reputation in the process.

How can established brands use it? Ridicule their competition process or ways. A humorous front can make you come out as a harmless entertainer while poking holes in the Reputation of your rival.

Barnum and Pearl’s fight did not end there. Later, Pearl came up with hypnotism events to attract a big crowd from the museum, but again, Barnum attacked him; this time, cleverly, he didn’t directly say anything about Pearl; instead, he held hypnotic events himself. He would put a girl to sleep and tell the audience that even copping finger would not pick her up, and she would not feel anything. While he would sharpen his knife, the girl would open her eyes and run downstage. He repeated this for weeks. Soon no one took Pearl’s events seriously.

Coming Back in Relevance

Burger King also used this strategy brilliantly in the 2010s; during their revamp of Burgerking, they created campaigns such as Woppher Detour and Burn that ad Campaigns which used Argument reality to allow people to post videos of them burning Mcdonalds’ Ads.

They even created an Advertisement Saying it’s better to have Burger King than a Clown.

They knew their new advertisements might not produce the same results as Mcdonald’s ads. So why not use Mcdonald’s name to get Footfall?

Mcdonald’s already had the Reputation of Being the best. When others poked holes in them, they became defensive, acting out of their way to reply, creating conflict between the two giants, and generating mIllions worth of media attention for Burgerking.

Almost every Billion Dollar Duopoly market has witnessed Humour marketing. Apple Did it with Microsoft with their ad Campaign I Am Mac.

Coco Cola and Pepsi are constantly at war with each other.

Examples are endless. The only thing you need to make sure before using is what stage your company is on. Indeed This is one of many ways, and there are maybe 100 more ways to create Viral Campaign.

Key Takeaways ( We have bonus points here )

• Competition is not always bad; sometimes it’s better to have Competition because it has done work of educating people. Now you need to scale. That’s what happened to initial D2C Brands.
• Humour is a powerful tool to be used in marketing, but it has to be used with care. If done in excess, it can backfire!
• Remember most important Step in any business is finding a problem worth solving. This is the most aspect of any business.
• Bonus Point —

Problem with Gelitte devices was that they focused too much on Incremental improvements, which were neither visible nor required, which increased R&D expenditure and was ultimately bore by Customers. In the race for Fancy innovations, we forget the core aspect of any product, which is its functionality.

In Burger King Story, To understand the problem with Burger King, New CEO worked like an employee in one of the outlets. Great leaders go to any extent to understand their business better.

I hope I was able to do justice to the time you spent reading my article thank you for reading I would love to interact with you in the comment section and hear your take on using the reputation of big brands to grow.

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