It’s not a comfortable question for NameLab, but there’s  enough weight on the “no” side of the scales to make it necessary to ask.

Today’s 30+ adult has spent maybe 15 years using the internet to learn about everything from sex to laundry detergent. These are the core consumers we all chase after.  Their attitude toward laundry detergents is converging on “there’s not enough difference to justify a premium price for a specific brand”.

Shoppers aren’t abandoning brands wholesale.  Even among savvy consumers, comfortable familiarity moves the orange Tide package from the shelf to the shopping cart.  But most packaged goods marketers face steady consumer migration to store brands and generics.  While the shelf view is pretty, all the fish seem pretty much the same.

This doesn’t seem to be a temporary effect of hard times.  It showed up in segment research in the 70′s; grew some in the 80′s; accelerated in the 90′s; and shows no indication to slow down in this century.   It’s not merely a U.S. market phenomenon.  At NameLab, we don’t have access to data to suggest it’s worldwide, but we’ve observed similar consumer behavior in Japan.

Because defensive strategies are the order of the day, you find more and more national brands at far-less-than-retail prices in Wal-Mart, Costco and other discount retailers.

Offense would be innovation.  Not “new lemon zest” in soap products, but meaningful new features and radical product ideas.

Package goods isn’t dead, it just needs a few companies like Apple to get consumers interested in brands based on important new products.

Retailing had a good long run.  It was fun while it lasted.  But it’s over.

A world where few purchases are made at physical stores?

Think about it…

-Consumers learn about products in great detail from manufacturer or etailer sites, with ratings, cautions, and opinions at increasingly wiki-like mass-input product info sites.

-The declining world economy (a long-term situation economists now call “the new normal”) is diminishing the scale of retailing.  For cost efficiency, there are fewer SKUs – soon we’ll have to make do with 30 styles of red stilettos rather than 300.

-Conspicuous consumption has become uncivil, our new lifestyle is “blending in” rather than “keeping up with the Joneses”.  To quote a line from a previous LabNotes: In this new pattern of social behavior,   profligacy has become…thinking hard here…what’s a word that combines “dumb” and “impolite”?

-Delivery systems like USPS, UPS, and FedEx have become more efficient as they’ve scaled up to meet home-delivery demand.

-Daily food no longer requires bought and stockpiled ingredients…these days it’s take-out, delivery, or eat at chain feed troughs.

-Complex, fast-evolving electronic products are far better suited to internet sales than retailing.  (Other than the Apple Store, part of a uniquely closed products and services ecosystem, mall electronics stores are fading away.)

-Mobile phones that transact with vending machines will cause those machines to proliferate.  Because every consumer will have a mobile phone, they’ll buy picture hooks, pantyhose and pajamas from a nearby machine.

-As retail margins and sales volumes have waned, corporate managers have been cutting costs: dimmer lighting, fewer window cleanings and tightening the wage and benefit screws on store employees.  So the register clerk you’ve waited longer to come face to face with is more likely to be the type of passively hostile, minimum-wage “sales associate” you’ll buy your next shoes at Zappos.com to avoid.

Now for the good part (for us brand pros anyway).  On the internet, your brand is the universal icon of what you are and what you sell.  Without the distraction of adjacent shelves of similar stuff, that icon is pure and potent on its web page.

Never has branding – especially the “good behavior” that underpins online brand value – been more important.

As media advertising fades away, the value of a clearly defined brand grows.  In our not-so-humble opinion, McInhenny’s Tabasco Sauce is a paragon of clear, consistent, and forceful branding.

Launched in 1868 by Edmund McIlhennny, the product is a hot sauce made from tabasco peppers, a Mexican variety planted on an island in South Louisiana.  From the beginning, McIlhenny realized the value of brand identity. His first batch was sent to stores in cologne bottles from New Orleans warehouse.  The package remains unique and evocative:

This 19th century McIlhenny print ad is an icon of graphics arts education.  Imagine its effect as a point-of-purchase display alongside today’s bland supermarket labels:

As The Doors put it, been down so long it looks like up to me captures the current mood of consumers (and marketers) mired in recession.

But it’s not all gloom and doom.  Besides reducing the cost of a house for first-time homebuyers, a recession shakes geriatric calcification out of the joints of commerce.  Old companies and old brands bite the dust, making room (office space, factory space, shelf space) for young companies with new ideas.

Japan’s been mired in recession since a liquidity induced real-estate bubble (sound familiar?) imploded in the 80′s.  One result is that young people – denied the traditional salaryman’s path from university to corporation to retirement when companies stopped hiring – have launched wave after wave of fresh new ventures.

The streets of Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka glitter with inventive new restaurants, stores and services created by a generation of college graduates who, absent the recession, would today be bored middle-management bureaucrats.

A similar phenomenon marked America’s Great Depression.  In 1933, for example, entrepreneurs founded small ventures that grew into Ashley Furniture Stores, E&J Gallo Winery, North American Van Lines, Rockwell Collins, Rubbermaid, Ryder System, and Waldenbooks. Waldenbooks was a typical recession idea, started by George Hoyt as a low-cost rental library in Bridgeport CT.

Which brings us to giant frogs.  The back pages of Depression-era pulp magazines were crammed with “business opportunities for entrepreneurs” like:

The internet is today’s pulp magazine.  We haven’t googled “Giant Frog”, but…

Whenever we get to thinking we’re the smartest guys on the block, somebody comes up with an idea that we wish we had had.

In this case it’s a company called Solve Media. They’ve developed a system to replace that distorted letter sequence called a CAPTCHA that you must interpret and type in to prove you’re human rather than a bot in order to register at a website.

So, rather than squinting at:

You can be carefully copying out something useful and memorable like:

The slogan appears in the CAPTCHA box in display typography masking a non-visible distortion element that defeats the bots.  Carefully reading and typing the slogan is supposed to embed a meme somewhere in your cranial file of “important things to remember if I ever need to hire an identity consultant” – and we suspect that it does.

We assume that the company will soon be selling CAPTCHA placements to savvy internet marketers worldwide.

We didn’t even know that CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart until we discovered all of this on the singularly informative Fast Company website:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1690163/effective-ads-to-replace-captchas?partner=rss

If you’ve been wondering how the widely-distributed Newman’s Own food brand would fare after the death of Paul Newman in 2008, here’s an update – it’s doing fine.

Founded in 1982 by Newman and a partner, the company eventually produced products ranging from salad dressing to lemonade.  Still privately held, its sales are estimated to be running at better than $100 million a year, with no drop off since Mr. Newman’s demise.

Since Mr. Newman was a screen actor – a celebrity rather than a food icon like Colonel Sanders or Wolfgang Puck – many marketing professionals expected his brand to wane once he was permanently off the public radar.

But a combination of early dedication to healthful ingredients and Mr. Newman’s promise to “donate every cent of my share of after-tax profits to charity” has created an enviable level of consumer loyalty to the brand.

It’s a clear example of the  fact that in this century brand behavior influences consumers more than claims.  Newman’s behaviors  (healthful ingredients, charitable giving)  add a positive patina to the consumers’ ideas about what a “brand” is.

Bravo!