Page 132 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

5.2 Product brand – Control your brand; control your destiny
It was early in my career when I started to develop our own brands. In 1995, I introduced into New Zealand a ventilation product from England under our own brand, not the supplier’s. Twenty-three years later our product still had the same brand, but it was our fourth supplier. We controlled the brand and our destiny. We just used other manufacturers. That is the power of a brand and controlling your destiny. If we had used the original brand of the supplier (which was a silly name anyway), and we found that the product wasn’t up to New Zealand conditions, it would have been very costly and messy developing a brand name and introducing another.
We did earlier on-sell some branded products that we didn’t own, but I phased them out when we didn’t have exclusivity and when it helped develop the market for other resellers. For example, we would go to a Home Show and there would be three companies selling the same brand. We would all be scraping and developing business for the same brand, product and dollar, and that excluded the zillion other companies not at the show!
I used to ask the resellers of our exclusive brands, ‘How many people sell this brand of heat pump in such-and-such an area? Ten to twenty? And how many sell our brand? Just one! You!’ This gave them the security to market our products and be assured of their own destiny.
Once we had our model sorted going forward, we would always look at controlling our destiny by owning our brand or have exclusivity on our products.