Tupperware’s bankruptcy should remind us what marketing actually does

If you go to business school, the marketing part of your course will open with a question like ‘What is a brand?’ posed by a professor who hasn’t worked in the industry for a decade. After a day of ruining a good white shirt with felt tips and bad coffee, the students will share their answers. Nine out of 10 of them will be total shite.

But you can identify those who have studied marketing because they’ll say something like a brand is “the sum value of your in-market assets.” It sounds wanky, but it’s a neat phrase that explains why marketing is a thing. And what branding even is.

A brand is a collection of memories in a population of brains, just as much an in-market asset as your factories, employees and products. It’s in-market. You’ve made it. And it’s just as valuable as all the distribution you’ve had to bribe Tesco for. Without those memories (or “brand equity,” if you’re in a pipe and slippers) … no one would choose your brand in the first place.

What’s particularly useful about thinking about a brand this way is that it already means you understand marketing best practices.

1) You can measure brand through researching these memories.

2) Memories fade, so the most important role of advertising is simply holding market share. We must do “brand-building” advertising, not just sell-sell-sell.

3) When you start thinking about a brand as a network of associations like this, you understand the concepts of brand image and category entry points. You need to build these things with strategic positioning and effective advertising.

There’s another definition of brand that you get from people who’ve worked in big FMCG marketing already, the poor fuckers, at the coal face who crush creative agencies under their procurement boots while trying to hold the latest adtech platforms to their sweet promises. These hard-faced, heavy drinkers have a different definition: a brand is the difference between Coke and Coca-Cola.

An equally brilliant but more practical POV showing the value difference between a brand and its closest commodity. Now, I already regret writing this next part, as it’s been a whole year since a marketer ruined a perfectly good Guinness by leaning over to ask me about “distinctiveness v differentiation.”

But here goes.

This practical definition has its merits because it succinctly explains the need for a distinct and different brand—two unique jobs.

First, to not be a commodity, you must be different. And before you open LinkedIn and start throwing abuse at me because Byron Sharp promised you “brand difference” doesn’t exist, wait up. Difference 100% exists because you can patent it. When you come up with something truly different, you get a sudden rushing head start. Just like Viagra. It didn’t really need to worry about brand until the patent recently ran out.

It’s like a startup, or “challenger brand,” as we are now meant to call them. You launch and sometimes have a unique proposition. Someone will also copy you, and the best you can do is slow them down with a patent. So, then, we need brand differentiation. What we might call ‘relative, meaningful differentiation’ means you need to stand for something (more than the commodity) that people care enough about. Otherwise, they will just buy the commodity. That could be being the most-trusted, fastest or even most eco-friendly. Deciding which one of those is your strategy, becoming that is your execution (the 4Ps).

Secondly, the other task is distinctiveness. If you’ve achieved this wonderful relative, meaningful differentiation, it all needs to be attributed to your brand. All those memories must be linked to something so advertising works and people can recognize you on the shelf. You need to “look like you” with famous and distinctive brand assets.

There’s also proof that this exists, as you can trademark (not patent) distinctiveness. If you link all this relatively differentiated value to your brand through a distinctive asset, you can trademark it. McDonald’s has done a solid job linking the Golden Arches to burgers, so we won’t let any burger brand steal these arches and that value. You can also measure this stuff through research.

That’s where Tupperware comes in. It failed at both

The best marketers balance this theoretical marketing view with the more practical view to grow brands. It takes both of these to understand how Tupperware dropped the ball.

One of my favorite marketing words is “antonomasia,” where a pronoun becomes the word to describe a general idea. A lawyer would call it trademark erosion, as would Escalator, Granola, Band-Aid, Bubble Wrap, Frisbee, Jacuzzi, Ping-Pong, and, of course, Tupperware. These are all brands that fell (upwards) and accidentally became generic category names. They became commodities. And their in-market assets slowly faded.

They all have two things in common:

1. They were different, then the category caught up. And they failed to achieve any relative differentiation.

2. They began to look like the category. And failed to achieve any distinctiveness.

It’s why I shudder when I hear a client declare their aim is to become “iconic.” The brands above are iconic, dusty and have little modern-day relevance. What you really want is an effective fame-building campaign to make your brand distinct and relatively different in the minds of today’s consumers. These things lead to salience, market share gains and profit. Just look at Guinness or Dr Pepper, which has done it amazingly.

As The Guardian article shares, Tupperware’s CEO said it “explored numerous strategic options and determined this [bankruptcy] was the best path.”

I’ve got an novel strategic option for you... how about doing some marketing?

And I mean this with all my heart, as this once lion of a brand slopes off into the history books. I thought I had a house full of Tupperware, but it turns out it’s just a load of plastic boxes with lids. Commodification. It’s the perfect example of why the marketing department exists.

Now I’m being (half) dramatic to make a point: the macro-economic climate is tough (effective marketing would help), there’s lots of competition now (effective marketing would help), and the brand is loaded with debt and doesn’t have lots of cash to waste (effective marketing would help).

You may be wondering why it took me so long to mention Tupperware in a column about Tupperware. But that’s exactly my point. If Tupperware had mentioned Tupperware a bit sooner, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Read more from Andrew here. And you can tell him how wrong he is about Tupperware on LinkedIn.