Brand promise crisis and utopia

- and very distant brandless realization of digital age.

Brand strategy, value and equity is often seen as magic silver bullet to solve business problems in technology business context. This common business leaders misconception lead to severe business failures while lack of real product or service eventually leads to customer value slump. It is common that easy, generalistic and simple concepts get the most of management attention like the brand centric talk around brand perspective only. Topics that majority management and executive are able to participate and awknowledge in their discussion get the most of the attention while more strategic causal, complex, systemic, abtract and technology enbodyment aspect get too little attention in strategic narratives.

Companies should review their product strategy, portfolio, segmentation and roadmap without brand aspects to realize truth about the products status in the market. This brandless approach is extreamly powerful concept to analyze products competitiveness in the market. The key question is that does company's product offer consumers the same quality product without paying extra for marketing, packing and services. The brandless analysis should focus on tangible and intangible value of product itself. Can products quality, functionality, features, esthetics, usability, sustainability, reliability, personalization, integrations, roadmap, updates, add-ons and extensions outperform competing branded products value to all customer segments and groups. How these cognitive address the salient product category and identification needs of the customer. The brand theory emphasis cognitive and emotional image creation. The cognitive image address primary product characteristics and secondary features. The overall intangible cognitive quality value is created with reliability, durability and servicability. The products style and design are essential part of cognitive image. In digital context design is not limited to design "form and function" but also must be seen to cover architecture "system-of-system" and engineering "system". These are often aspects that current management is not able to conceive and therefore the devil lies often in the details of the plural views of design (architecture and engineering).

Brandless product strategy SWOT is brutal way to review product judgement by customers, competition and market substitutions. Eventually the judgement is bases on quality, credibility, cognitive considerations, superiority and price. The brandless product strategy dialog is powerful way to engage management and executive to focus on "product" strategy of an organization. This dialog should cover:

Product strategy

- current product analysis, positioning, definition, delivery and services.

Product realization

- organization, development, business case, legal, IPR, performance and risks.

Product competition

- lifecycle, roadmaping, releases and requirements management.

Product capability

- management, skills, competencies, sourcing, partners, cluster and ecosystem.

Organizations fail in real competition while lacking strategic brandless product management and development competencies and capabilities. Organizatioms which are not able to compete with broad product value front fail by offering only standard bulk and substituting basic products. Today's digital market are open for free competition. This global 6.000 billion € markets consumers and demand side is hunger for new players to offer new competing software products as apps, services and platform.

If your organizations is in need of new product business and innovation strategy - it may be finally worth to spend few moments with digital product management and strategy expert.

Your brandless product strategy and innovation evangelist,

Mika