The Consistency of a Brand’s Positioning

Of late my environment consciousness radar has been more active than before. From giving up straws to refusing bottled water, I am trying to take small steps towards being friendlier towards the environment. My husband and I shop for the week’s veggies at an organic veggie pop up market every Sunday. Apart from veggies and fruit, it offers various types of organic produce – soaps and cleansers, varieties of rice, grains, pickles, pesto, butter and ghee etc. Alongside, since the market starts and packs up early, it also offers breakfast – piping hot idlis and sambar. Two weekends ago, there was also a guy selling fresh squeezed orange and malta juice. I ordered a glass of juice and wandered off to finish my purchases while he got the juice ready. Much to my dismay when I returned to the stall, it was being served up in a thin, single use plastic glass, and even worse, he had already inserted a plastic straw into it. Much of the joy of the delicious fresh juice was diluted by the careless single-use plastic waste generated.

Recently, we were pitching for a sanitary napkin business. During the course of our research into the category, my eco-warrior colleague pointed out the extent to which sanitary waste clutters the environment. A single pad takes 500-800 years to decompose! Even tampons take 6 months to decompose! Informed about eco-friendly alternates by my colleague, I did additional research online and moved to a brand that uses no plastic and makes the pads out of banana fibers, which are biodegradeable. So imagine my dismay when not only did the biodegradeable packs come packaged in a carton wrapped in plastic, but each pad comes wrapped in single use plastic!

In contrast, Amazon never ceases to annoy with the quantum of packaging it uses. Once I received a paperback book – 1 book – clingwrapped, cushioned on all four sides with plastic airbags, and packed into a 1 foot X 1 foot cardboard carton! But while it irritates, there’s no impact on brand trust because it didn’t promise me eco friendliness, it promised me fast delivery. Their new policy of asking what kind of packaging you want has, of course, led to customer delight.

It seems to me that when a brand is created or crafted with a certain purpose, it needs to walk an extra mile to ensure that it fulfils that purpose across all consumer touchpoints, else the purpose remains at a superficial level. The sense of letdown with a brand that promises to be responsible but doesn’t completely fulfil that promise is far higher than with a brand that didn’t make such a promise in the first place. Do you agree?

Tell me some examples of brands that you think fulfil their promise completely, and some that leave it halfway…