Around The World In 14 (Shopping) Days: Label Libel

PG contributing editor David Diamond pays a visit to a Hong Kong market on the first leg of an Asian trip and discovers an invaluable lesson in branding.

I recently took an extended trip to Asia, including visits to Hong Kong, Cambodia and The Philippines.

While tourism was the primary activity, I also visited lots of stores and other retail environments, and saw some unusual things, which got me thinking.

Perhaps my most interesting — if most perplexing — retail experience during my first stop, in Hong Kong, involved the oddest branding situation I've ever encountered. At one of the many markets in town, I came across a stand selling men's dress shirts. The price was right, the fabrics were quite nice and the workmanship seemed adequate, so I looked at the brand. All of the shirts sold at this stand were labeled Mantmax, a brand I'd never heard of, but the proprietor of the stand showed me that the label in the collar was, in fact, made of paper, and that under it was another label that read Hugo Boss. Other shirts I admired were labeled Nautica and other leading brands.

In China, no one respects trademarks, so you simply go to the fake mall and buy fake designer products. But in Hong Kong, there is at least a pretense of intellectual property protection, which presents a unique and bizarre opportunity to buy fake Hugo Boss shirts with additional fake labels hiding their (fake) identity. It's the retail version of the movie “Inception.”

A few stands down, I saw an attractive belt. I picked it up and noticed that it was stamped with the Gucci logo on the tail end. I then saw a bunch of other belts, all identical to the one I had tried on, but each of these was stamped with a different designer logo. The idea was that first you picked the belt you liked, and then you got to decide which designer label you wanted to wear.

At the market in Hong Kong, brands are important, but at this point, they've been completely disassociated from the activity that created the brand. At least in this situation, it's expected that a consumer would want to buy a brand, but the reasons for buying the brand have nothing to do with product quality — these goods were all clearly fakes — and it has nothing to do with design, either, as the belt stand didn't even pretend that it was copying specific designer goods. The brand, in this situation, is simply a piece of status that becomes a product feature. My conclusion is that this either means that brands have lost their value completely, or that they've become so powerful that they create value in and of themselves, totally removed from product design and quality.

When I start thinking about U.S. food stores in relation to this brand craziness, I believe there are lessons to be learned. Specifically, what I saw in Hong Kong represents the beginning of the end for some over-promoted fashion brands. When fashion brands are far removed from either the quality or the design capability that built them in the first place, and become solely the power of their own logos, the brands themselves have lost value as anything except status symbols, which means that they're probably relatively short-lived.

That being the case, we need to protect our brands. Retailers, and especially manufacturers, need to remind themselves continually that their brands stand for something, that they have meaning, that they need to be refreshed and supported, not endlessly extended, sometimes to the point of irrelevance. Through their own aggressive expansion and licensing programs, combined with out-of-control brand piracy, certain brand names have begun to lose meaning. We in the food business need to make sure that this doesn't happen to us.