Seth vs. Branding Strategy
Today Seth overlooked a couple of concepts.
It’s a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless.
I follow Seth’s Blog regularly. Sometimes witty, usually valuable insights that apply to life, family, and business far beyond the focus of the blog - marketing.
But today’s message on dumb branding strategies doesn’t feel right. Computer Land says about the same thing to me as Best Buy. That is, “Hey, look! We have a whole enterprise, a single place for you to find (fill in the blank)!” I grew up with Koele’s Grocery Store. Down the road is Bartlett’s Lumber. The store is assumed in the name, sometimes, and really says exactly the same thing as the ‘world’, ‘land’, etc. - these are marketing synonyms for ’store’. And the market understands that context. Disneyland isn’t a place where Disney is (was) - Disneyland is a store, a marketed place to exchange money for recreation, a feeling of the stories and scenery from favorite Disney-related stories.
Possibly ‘land’ or ‘world’ is intended to imply this is the only place this particular product or collection is available. Or, at least, the only place you should go for that product.
And Seth wraps us with a dig at some names that succeeded against is ‘dumb branding’ rule - including Radio Shack. Radio Shack got its name from its roots - the magic early years of experimental and amateur radio, and the military term for the place where radios were kept. Radio Shack used to be a place to pick up a 120/3.6 volt transformer, a couple ceramic or paper capacitors, or a vacuum tube. You could test your vacuum tubes to see if they needed replaced. Later you could pick up a 2n3055 transistor, or an LM335 integrated circuit chip. The store in town no longer carries 1/4 watt resistors, and the store manager can’t read the color codes on a resistor. The ’shack’ in the Radio Shack name is not related to the ‘land’ part of Computerland - ‘radio shack’ was a current expression of the times at the the business began. Kind of like Game eXchange. The Radio Shack name used to represent a knowledgeable comrade in the craft and hobby of early electronics.