Is Corporate Brand Obsession Hurting Product Quality?

An unintended outgrowth of business fascination with the promise of the internet generally and social media specifically has been a renewed senior executive focus on brand and marketing. It is not as though those subjects were ever ignored or out of favor in the past. It is just that they were often left to the care of managers steeped in that culture or discipline.

The explosion of on-line commerce and the huge global numbers whose attention they draw has caused business leaders to concentrate more on the potential for growth inherent in the creation of new markets than on the grinding detail of squeezing higher margins out of manufacturing processes. Production recently has often been relegated to inexpensive export platforms such as in China, where the outsourcing relationship was governed by managers providing their offshore partners with marketing-driven cost/price specs. The job of the client company was to manage its complex supply chain, not the granular specifics of production itself.

Geoffrey James comments in Brand Marketing Insider on how this may have unintentionally - but inevitably - led to declines in product quality, innovation, safety and security. Ironically, the result of that diminution has been to undermine the value of the brands on which so much attention was being lavished. Why pay a premium for a branded product if you are not getting superior quality in return? The lesson in this is that alignment of all elements of the creative-productive-sales process are deeply intertwined. You can not work on any one of them without affecting the others. JL:

"Johnson & Johnson is in deep trouble. As explained in a recent article in the New York Times, the company has gotten caught distributing medicine that’s gotten moldy, has bits of metal in it, or was made in facilities that government inspectors found to be unsanitary. They’ve been forced to recall so many products that some consumers are finding it difficult to locate J&J products.

If they’re still looking for them, that is. There’s been a steady erosion of J&J’s market share in favor of generics, partly because people no longer believe that a product with the J&J label on it (or one of its 92 product brands) is of higher quality. That’s very bad news for a company whose market strategy assumes that people will pay more for a branded product.

J&J’s management seems helpless to fix the company’s manufacturing problems. But that’s not surprising, because J&J is a perfect example of a company where top management didn’t just drink the brand marketing kool-aid, but poured it down their gullets, with a kool-aid chaser.

J&J has 92 (count ‘em, 92) consumer product brands. As a consequence, the company spends an enormous amount of money on marketing.
Johnson & Johnson is in deep trouble. As explained in a recent article in the New York Times, the company has gotten caught distributing medicine that’s gotten moldy, has bits of metal in it, or was made in facilities that government inspectors found to be unsanitary. They’ve been forced to recall so many products that some consumers are finding it difficult to locate J&J products.

If they’re still looking for them, that is. There’s been a steady erosion of J&J’s market share in favor of generics, partly because people no longer believe that a product with the J&J label on it (or one of its 92 product brands) is of higher quality. That’s very bad news for a company whose market strategy assumes that people will pay more for a branded product.

J&J’s management seems helpless to fix the company’s manufacturing problems. But that’s not surprising, because J&J is a perfect example of a company where top management didn’t just drink the brand marketing kool-aid, but poured it down their gullets, with a kool-aid chaser.

J&J has 92 (count ‘em, 92) consumer product brands. As a consequence, the company spends an enormous amount of money on marketing.