Customer branding of commodity products: The customer-developed brand
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JULIA R. PENNINGTON is a PhD candidate in marketing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her areas of interest are branding, agribusiness, international marketing, macromarketing and strategy.
A. DWAYNE BALL is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interests are in the explanation of customer loyalty, measurement of consumer behaviour constructs and marketing systems.
K e ywor ds
Abstract
customer branding; commodity; undifferentiated product; brand evolution
The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the process and implications of customer branding of commodity products. Customer branding is defined by the authors as a process in which a customer or customers define, label and seek to purchase an otherwise undifferentiated or unbranded product. The customer(s) can be anywhere along the value chain and may be intermediate, industrial or end-user customers. There are many historical examples of customer branding (which sometimes turned into strong corporate brands), and customer branding may be much more common today than marketers realise. As the authors show, it still exists in modern commodity markets. Marketing theory has lost the understanding of this concept. By considering the product chain and the process of branding when customers rather than marketers enact it, the paper provides a new insight into the process of branding in general, and proposes that the evolution of brands can move from a customer-branded product to strong corporate brands. The authors contend that customer branding exists and by understanding the phenomena, value chain participants can increase revenue and improve product movement.
Journal of Brand Management (2009) 16, 455–467. doi:10.1057/palgrave.bm.2550131; published online 16 November 2007
INTRODUCTION ‘There is no such thing as a commodity. All goods and services are differentiable.’1
Julia R. Pennington Marketing Department University of Nebraska-Lincoln 315 CBA, P.O. Box 880492 Lincoln, NE 68588-0492, USA Tel: + 1 (402) 472 2316 Fax: + 1 (402) 472 9777 E-mail: juliepennington@global. t-bird.edu
Differentiating your product, niche marketing and branding are all concepts commonly taught to beginning marketing students as they learn the value of having an easily identified product. Typically, products are branded by the manufacturer or producer of the product.2 What happens, however, when a product is not branded in the marketplace by the manufacturer or producer? How, when and why
do customers differentiate and brand the products themselves? Customer branding is defined by the authors as a process in which a customer, or customers, define, label and seek to purchase a subset of an otherwise undifferentiated or unbranded product. The customer can be anywhere along the value chain, including intermediate and enduser customers. As an example, Levitt3 discusses how televisions in the Soviet Union in the 1960s were unbranded and undifferentiated products. The generic televisions
© 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1350-23IX B
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