On brands

The brand

The "brand" refers to the essence of a line of products. A brand could merely consist of a set of symbols with colours (and shades thereof). This could involve a very elaborate visual identity, or could tend towards the monochromatic and minimalist.

For example, an image of a simple red shell on a yellow background evokes the identity of a specific fuel company. The silhouette of an apple serves as another. A slogan acts as a textual example of branding. An elaborate coat of arms provides a historical take on elaborate branding from centuries past.

Yet, brands involve more than logos or slogans. They also comprise their offerings: products and services, as well as their ability to expand beyond those offerings.

The "big tent" brand

The “big tent” refers to something that covers “all things for all people”. We know that nothing can please everyone. Some of us can’t even please a few people. Even more humorously, pleasing ourselves can, more often than not, fall short!

Something that tries to do everything for everyone ends up in deep excrement. Any given random person can have an overly unique combination of desires that would not match up with “the solution”. That solution may contain great things for most aspects of that person's life, but that solution can also come at the detriment to some aspects of the same person's life. We can sense this in many things these days: party politics, “package deals”, newspapers, pre-determined systems and more.

Big tents have desired and undesired flavours:

The desired

Niches

The niche will promise you one thing or a limited selection of things. That tells us that they try to stay laser-focused on doing one or those few things well. Varying degrees of the niche exist. Usually, a niche tries to zoom into a specific product offering such as "Jon's Coffee" but could later "branch out" and rebrand as simply "Jon's". This brings forth the other side of the spectrum: hypermarkets.

Hypermarkets

The hypermarket provides a lot of things but promises nothing. We go into a hypermarket because it has a plethora of items to offer. It hopes that we find at least one thing and that the one thing leads to another. It also hopes that we go back to the hypermarket on another day because of its multitude of offerings.

So, the hypermarket has something for most, if not all, of our living needs. The hypermarket may suggest to us other things to procure, but it doesn’t necessarily make us do so.

While the offerings of a hypermarket may fall short of our desires, we got what we selected and what we thought would meet our needs. We did not get anything else that we did not choose to get.

The undesired

Recall that the “big tent” imposes on us an excess of components. We may not only have no need for those components, but we may actually despise them. Regardless of which, political parties fail because they try to (or have to) address a whole suite of issues, most of which might not affect us at all.

Package deals, such as guided vacation itineraries, will take us to some random “filler” places with little to no personal value.

Periodical clearinghouses (and their modern counterpart, the paywall-ridden news websites) have “sports” or “entertainment” sections that we may not care about. Yet, it comes with the subscription price.

Pre-determined systems often contain so many different components. Many of these components will remain unused and feel “bloated”. Software brands try to advertise a bunch of features but most of us will never use them.

Summary

Brands are mostly what they offer: they can offer "separable varieties" such as in the case of the hypermarket, or try to offer "imposed varieties" such as the package deal. Other "niche" brands focus on a simple core offering.

The hypermarket that does everything badly will fail, especially one that imposes a package deal. The niche that tries to do one thing badly will also fail, but at least they can focus on that one source of failure.

"Jack of all trades, master of none" or "do one thing and do it well!"