Blog brand repertoire
How many shampoo brands can you name spontaneously? The average is about five for shampoo category. Within the context of merchandising, that figure is quite dependent on product category structure and distribution rate (the number of brands) in the shelf space. It could be as low as two when the category is inactive and calm such as kitchen detergent and as high as five when the category is active and noisy such as shampoo or skincare….Now, ask yourself: How many blogs can you name spontaneously? Or, how many do you subscribe and consume? What is your blog repertoire? If it is greater than, say, ten, then we could say this category is quite different from the rest of products or services especially those we consumer in our daily life.
He bets that the average is 30 — more than other media brands you could probably name. What does that mean? Not sure. Maybe it means we’re just people, not brands.
: Separately, I was reading a piece in Ad Age with outgoing Time Warner exec Don Logan, who was asked what was different about the publishing business today and replied:
Too many magazines. Everybody needs to prune their portfolio a little bit. Go out to a newsstand and there’s so many out there jammed in that it’s hard to find them. And most of the magazines are not very good… they just throw things together thinking they can generate some advertising.
In that view — media 1.0 — outlets and brands are a zero sum game of limited shelf space. In the new view — the distributed-to-the-edge internet — there is no scarcity of brand space. Now some will argue that there is, instead, a scarcity of attention but I don’t disagree: We all have the same attention we always had, we now get to chose to spend it more wisely, that’s all.
Tags: Weblogs
February 17th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
[...] Yep. But, with publishers chasing agrowing (not shrinking) ad market… More magazines are coming to limited shelf space near you. Just check out Folio [magazine] and you’ll see it’s true! [...]
February 17th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
[...] He goes on to suggest that people can name more blogs, and that this suggests blogs are a different kind of product. But how many with a 7 year old pounding on you? (via Buzz Machine) This entry is filed under Computers & Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Leave a Reply [...]
February 17th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
Blogs ARE brands, but not in the sense that Shampoos are brands. Blogs are more like artists. I’d rephrase the question:
How many rock can you name spontaneously? Or, how many do you buy and download? How big is your record collection?
Clearly there’s more than 10. Or 30 even. Some folks only listen to 5 bands. Some listen to 5,000. But I think that’s the better analogy. It’s still all media, right?
February 17th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
I’m the biggest blog reader out of anyone I know personaly (read: in real life), and I could only name 10 in the first 30 seconds, and I kinda cheated. Do we count it if I name my MySpace blog that only I an a few of my close friends read? Do I count Kenji Mori, of whose existence I found out about 45 seconds ago?
Well, as I was writing this I thought up a few more names, so I took a minute to try to see if there were any more I remembered. I got 5. So after about two minutes, I’ve got 15 blogs.
February 17th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
Jeff,
I should have said “subscribe” instead of “name spontaneously.”(in case of shampoo, “name” and “buy” highly correlated, though). The reason I bet on 30 because I myself subscribe to 37 now. But I don’t think it can be as high as 5,000 on a subscription basis.
Bruno,
Thank you for rephrasing the question. Yes, blogs as a product more resemble music download than shampoo.
February 17th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
What’s the cost of getting your average shampoo brand on the shelf at Wal-Mart, versus the cost of getting your average blog up and running? Much MUCH lower barriers to entry in the blogosphere means many more blogs to choose from.
February 17th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
I think people will increasingly come to rely on News Aggregators like News Bump where you have a large group deciding what’s interesting. Just scanning all the normal mags and newspapers these days for the good bits takes forever. Better to let a like-minded group do the hard work for you.
February 18th, 2006 at 8:05 am
“the distributed-to-the-edge internet”
Hey, that’s coinable!
February 18th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
I think blogs are one of the factors that are irreversibly transforming brands from the bottom up. When brands controlled shelf space, they also controlled name space, and to a large degree, attention space. Today that space is infinitely larger, as Jeff points out, and brands are losing their grip. It’s not just in magazines, but all across the economy.
Brands must change, or die. They have no future as stylized sales stimulants that compete for attention in a controlled space. Their future is to compete on value delivered to customers, in the wide open spaces. Blogs and similar tools will be the means to create that value, much of it directly involving customers themselves.
February 21st, 2006 at 11:37 pm
For your reference: Technorati’s new feature can accommodate up to 50 fovorite blogs in http://technorati.com/faves/