When a Product Becomes Irrelevant

Everyone has seen those commercials where a group of hipsters demonstrate how incredibly free, exuberant and insanely hip their lives are. They're either playing Frisbee golf while wearing trendy sweaters and scarves or riding ultra-cool scooters while racing through traffic-free downtown streets, also wearing trendy sweaters and scarves. At the end you discover that the commercial was for a product that never even appeared prominently in the ad. Something like underwear or cola or hair care products. You are left scratching your head saying, "What was THAT all about?"

Of course corporations no longer sell products. They sell images and lifestyles. They tell you virtually nothing about the product itself and more about the type of life you will have if you buy it. Many times they tell you as little about the product they are selling as possible.

Could this be because they have nothing else to offer? Like a guy who drives a Hummer, perhaps they are trying to compensate for what they don't have. After all, they are probably thinking, it's just shampoo. With hundreds of options on shampoo, or virtually every product, most producing fairly similar results, why would someone choose one over the other?

Take light beer. Anyone who tells you that they have a preference over Bud Light, Miller Lite or Coors Light is kidding themselves. They all taste remarkably similar. The only way to separate themselves is by advertising and brand loyalty/recognition.

Even when Coors says that its beer tastes better because it "brewed cold and shipped cold" it has everything to do with its Rocky Mountain refreshment image and nothing to do with actual taste.

Or say you set 10 pairs of jeans out in front of someone – all similar in price and quality. What could make someone choose one over the other? Perhaps the image and branding the corporation has spent so much on to create. Toss in some brand familiarity and perhaps some trendy swing dancers in a commercial and suddenly one pair of jeans seems more desirable than the next.

The same could be said for virtually every product. Take away the global onslaught of ads, the theme stores and the athlete endorsements (actually athletes don't really endorse products as much as they appear in non-speaking roles, usually sweating profusely, extremely hungry or running up the stairs of an empty stadium) and Nike becomes any old company selling overpriced shoes made in overseas sweatshops.

But a Swoosh magically increases the value of footwear by 200 percent. After all, the Nike Swoosh tells you everything about what kind of athlete you can be or what kind of active, bold and aggressive lifestyle you can achieve. But nothing about shoes.