Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

One section of my Real-World Marketing seminar is titled, “Live by Price, Die by Price.” When you stake your business on being the low-cost provider, you’ve backed yourself into a corner. The minute somebody does it for cheaper, you’ve lost your customer. You’ve got no intrinsic value and therefore are easily expendable.

If a company’s “brand” is “We’re cheap!” - well, there you go. Doesn’t inspire you to stick with it through thick and thin, does it?

Even Big Wally is going to fall one of these days. Rob Frankel sums up their core “cluelessness” problem very well over at Wal-Mart, Blacks and Nuns. He begins by saying,

You have to hand it to Wal-Mart. No matter how bad things get for them, they always manage to make it even worse. First are those urban legends about them driving Mom and Pop stores out of business. I don’t know that any of those stories ever were proven, but true or not, they’ve added more than one log to the Wal-Mart fire.

He goes on to make the case that Wal-Mart doesn’t, in fact, have a brand. Good food for thought!

Here’s a test for you. When you hear “Wal-Mart” - what are the very first words that pop into your head? Now - would you want that to be your brand?

Tags: branding, public relations, Wal-Mart, marketing, marketing troubleshooting