Good money wasted on branding??

A difficult question which no marketer wants to really answer unless he suddenly wishes to sell his brand. In which case a brand equity study and a customer lifetime value will be analysed on the brand and a heavily overstated value like 50 times what the brand is worth is stated as the purchase price.

This approach might no longer work in recessionary times, but I wasn't really thinking of discussing this in this post.

Recently I had the opportunity to be a common consumer. Is that cool or what!! I almost thought that I could never be one, I always jump too easily on the other side.

Anyway it has been a really long time since I was a part of a band and I recently got the opportunity. I thought I would pick up a drumkit and having been out of the drumming scene for a cool 5 years was very skeptical on which brand / make etc.

I had heard of Tama and Pearl way back in the days when I had no money to afford either and remember fantasizing about them. The fantasy was very easily revived and they seemed my top 2 choices.

Then I spoke to a contemporary drummer and he suggested Mapex. I had heard very little on the brand. I actually didn't like the sound of the brand name as much as Tama. I almost decided against Mapex basis the fact that I didn't like the sound of the brand name!! This is what high involvement rational decisions are made of you know...

Sanity prevailed at last, and I decided to jump onto some drummer forums and check out older discussions comparing the brands. What struck me in the discussion was a drummer who had been playing the professional circuit for 10 years stated, that Mapex doesn't focus on marketing but spends its money on research, while the other brands spend loads on marketing.

As a marketer for several years, I have no idea why I would buy that argument. But somehow the community of drummers seemed to favour Mapex and it seemed that the newbees under the influence of a clever marketer were talking Pearl and Tama.

Now I might be totally wrong, but that was the impression I got from the forums I visited. This is not an endorsement of any brand but just a reflection of what I went through in a high involvement purchase.

Now if Tama and Pearl tracked drummer conversation sufficiently, they might have been able to influence purchase online too. But that brings me to the discussion for my next post, do overtly advertised brands have a lower probability of being owned and marketed by their consumers?

Stay locked on, we take a break for a couple of days before we come back with something on that one