Stop trying to make your brand “premium”
In advertising, trends come and go. This one had no right to happen.
I recently had an orange juice client, they were the bottom-of-the-barrel cheap household name OJ that everyone who doesn’t drink orange juice drinks. When you know you need a bottle for a party, a recipe, or a cocktail, but you’re more of a soda or just plain water person, you know their brand as the go-to “everybody’s orange juice” brand. It’s cheap price-wise, but it’s not gross, and nobody is going to complain that this is the OJ you have. And to be the “everybody’s go-to” in your category is something every brand dreams of being. They’re like Heinz ketchup, everyone already loves them for who they are.
That’s such a powerful position to have, every brand desperately wants that status, many will try until the sun explodes, and they will never reach it. It’s a killer pedestal to sit on. Their only competition was the slow-growing number of new brands in this space as consumers seek less mass-market environmentally-disastrous corporations. So instead of leaning on their status of “everyone’s favorite” as their strength, they came to us wanting to make them more… premium.
The Brand-wagon
The language, the messaging, the positioning, the trends in marketing are kind of like rings on a planet, they tend to follow a flat path along the equator that everyone else is already on, floating throughout the current but not straying too far. And most brands put themselves into those rings.
One year it was all about authenticity. To be the “Uber” of something was a slow burn too. And there’s a growing trend of brands saying they’re “democratizing” something. But at the moment, the big one is a lot of “premium” going around — entirely among brands that are the farthest thing from premium. To help visualize that, I made a diagram of what it would look like if “every brand using the word premium” and “actual premium” were tangible objects with a geographic distance:
It’s just like a wormhole. You can see premium, you know it’s there, but it’s so monumentally far away, that nothing will actually get you there with the current state of affairs. Why?
An Identity Crisis
Because premium brands don’t call themselves premium, they know who they are. A Chanel handbag or an Audi with leather seats are premium. A Jansport backpack or a Honda Civic are not premium, and no amount of “messaging” is going to alter reality.
Don’t believe me? Head to Google and type the advanced search below:
“premium” site:chanel.com
Out of the first 20 results, Chanel only uses the word premium once, where they describe the source of actual ingredients — apparently a variety of ume flower — in a cream oil where the word is buried halfway down the page. Aside from duplicate page results of that product, the other 19 uses are entirely customer reviews of their products on their site, where the customer uses the word “premium” to describe everything from the product they bought to the way it was wrapped when it was delivered at their door.
Now type this into Google: “premium” site:smirnoff.com
Like the OJ I mentioned, Smirnoff is that vodka everybody who doesn’t normally drink vodka buys when they need some. From the results, they have six different products with the word “premium” in the name of the beverage itself. Aside from that, they simply call themselves “premium vodka” all over their website. You know why anyone who has ever worked in alcohol can tell you why Smirnoff isn’t premium? Because when the bar runs out of Grey Goose, they go in the back and pour Smirnoff out of a 750ml plastic bottle into the beautifully frosted-texture empty Grey Goose one.
Fact: People who want premium know what premium is. They’re not going to be fooled into thinking your non-premium product is actually premium because you say it is. People who don’t care about premium aren’t fooled either, because they know they’re not buying premium when they spend a normal amount of money on your product — and frankly, they don’t care anyway, remember? Nobody in their head is debating, “hm, is this brand more premium now? They say that word a lot, so I guess that’s a reason to buy it!”
I’ve worked on dozens of car brands in my career. Among them, three of them were premium: Maserati, Alfa Romeo, and Jaguar. And another three of them stood out as not premium, but repeatedly had us do campaigns to call them premium: Mazda, Volvo, and Renault. Nobody looks at a Mazda and thinks of a Maserati.
In the last year, I’ve had everyone from cheap boxed tea to cheap copy-paper clients, all wanting to be premium. A quick search on my computer shows I have three powerpoints in the last 7 days alone that use the word — for three different clients. The only premium brand I work on today never calls themselves such.
The only reality
What can make a brand premium is making a more premium product. Higher quality, longer lasting, stronger use, better materials, and that often comes with a higher price, which is part of the premium package. But if you’ve established yourself as a decent reliable brand, don’t try to change that. Savor it. If you’ve established yourself as a dogsh*t product, work on improving the faults. But if you don’t have people actively making counterfeits of your product, or regularly paying for your service with an HSBC credit card, you’re not premium, no amount of “messaging” will change that. Most of all, you don’t need to be. The vast majority of people don’t actually care about “premiumness” at all. Overconsumption is on the way out. Most folks just want the basics.
