MARIA DUBUC President
COLUMN
MBD
LET’S INVENT YOUR [OWN BRAND] FUTURE TOGETHER The challenge of writing this article for the January 2021 issue of Global Retail Brands magazine is avoiding the cliches of Covid-19, lamenting the lost year of 2020, and the inevitable forced change. Instead, I will ignore some of those cliches and wholeheartedly embrace others. Let’s begin and end with quotes from pioneering thinker, American engineer, architect, and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller. For more than five decades, Fuller developed solutions that reflected his commitment to the potential of innovative design to create solutions for “more with less” and thereby improve human lives. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
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With Fullers’ words in mind, I have three imperatives for 2021 designed to build a new private brand model that makes the existing model obsolete.
1. Start from Zero Stop asking how to make your products and brands in your private brand portfolio incrementally different. Stop asking to mimic national brands. Start from Zero – assume all of your brands are disposable, and do not assume sales volume equals brand worth. Start with a blank piece of paper and create the brands your customers cannot live without.
As a retailer, marketer, brand builder, product developer, and global sourcing expert, you can create brands that speak to shoppers in a relevant and engaging way. You can create brands composed of products sourced from any country globally, at any quality and any price. Take a close look at Target. Over the last ten years, the retailer has systematically reinvented its private brand portfolio. They did this by dramatically killing billion-dollar private labels to launch brands. Target’s latest move was to kill Archer Farms and introduce Good & Gather.
Create brands, not tiers. Create solutions, not commodities.
