{"id":528,"date":"2010-02-08T02:44:30","date_gmt":"2010-02-07T16:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/?p=528"},"modified":"2010-02-09T04:42:12","modified_gmt":"2010-02-08T18:42:12","slug":"the-downside-of-generic-brands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/08\/the-downside-of-generic-brands\/","title":{"rendered":"The Downside Of Generic Brands"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brands like Xerox,\u00a0Maggi and,\u00a0to a lesser\u00a0extent,\u00a0SAP, virtually represent\u00a0entire product categories. With a dominant market share,\u00a0\u00a0such\u00a0generic brands have not only enabled their owners earn huge revenues\u00a0in the native product categories – Xerox in\u00a0photocopiers (viz. getting a “xerox” copy even if you use a Canon photocopier), \u00a0Maggi in\u00a0noodles and SAP in\u00a0ERP\u00a0– but have also helped them enter new product categories through\u00a0brand extensions.<\/p>\n

If you take the example of Google – the ultimate generic brand of the past decade – it dominates Internet search so strongly that it has become a verb – you no longer search for something on the Internet, you Google it.<\/p>\n

Surely, it’s every marketer’s dream to create a generic brand?<\/p>\n

I’m not so sure.<\/p>\n

Apart from search, Google owns Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Sites, Google Translate, and many other products that are\u00a0unrelated to search. However, it’s not a secret that search advertising contributes to over 90% of Google’s revenues.\u00a0It is tempting to ascribe this lopsided revenue distribution to the relative newness of Google’s non-search products – “when will they come out of beta?”, I hear many of you ask.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0a recent experience makes me wonder if there are more fundamental factors at play behind the negligible contribution of non-search products to Google’s topline.<\/p>\n

\"gb01_300\"<\/a>My company recently partnered with a leading computer technology college toward development of a widget, which is soon to be launched as a GTM360\u00a0marketing solution\u00a0(for those interested, called EMAIL360<\/a><\/strong>, this email uploader widget will enable websites to collect visitor contact information in a highly frictionless manner).\u00a0Since Google Gadget<\/a> was one of the sources of insight regarding\u00a0architecture for this widget, the research paper based on this\u00a0project cited Google as a reference.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, this reference was promptly rejected on the grounds that a research paper was expected to go beyond listing the zillions of websites that show up when you Google for ‘widget’. The examiners wanted a reference from a company that had a\u00a0strong presence\u00a0in widgets and, because Google only meant search to them,\u00a0it didn’t qualify when it came to widgets.<\/p>\n

This illustrates the challenge that Google faces while trying to gain mindshare in product categories outside Internet search. How well Google overcomes this challenge might determine when its non search products will make a significant contribution to its revenues – if ever.<\/p>\n

The story doesn’t end there: When presented with a screenshot of the EMAIL360 landing page from GTM360’s website, the college’s brass accepted\u00a0GTM360 as a fitting reference for widgets!<\/p>\n

When someone rejects a reference to Google and accepts one from GTM360 in its place, you know there’s a big downside of being a generic brand!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brands like Xerox,\u00a0Maggi and,\u00a0to a lesser\u00a0extent,\u00a0SAP, virtually represent\u00a0entire product categories. With a dominant market share,\u00a0\u00a0such\u00a0generic brands have not only enabled their owners earn huge revenues\u00a0in the native product categories –…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sketharaman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}