most bus companies should sell their product, not their brand

The origin of branding goes way back thousands of years in agricultural history as farmers marked their own cattle with a hot iron.

All cows and sheep look the same, right? So, the easiest way to quickly show whose was whose in the field full of them was by branding a mark on their skin. Modern branding isn't that much different.

Take eggs. All eggs, near-enough, look the same, so the only way to differentiate your eggs from someone else's is through visual triggers like packaging and advertising. This helps consumers make a decision of which eggs to buy when they are choice-rich but time-poor.

But how big a part does the whole brand thing play when the customer only has the choice of your eggs or no eggs? 

Or swinging it back to public transport, when the customer only has the choice of your bus or no bus?

This post all came about after watching a brand-led TV campaign for Stagecoach, which you can watch on YouTube here.

All brands are trying to do one of two things with their marketing - grow the market or grow their share of that market - and then depends on whether they are the market leader. If they're the market leader, they want to maintain the status quo, and if they're not, they're chasing a bigger share of the pie.

But nearly every (not all) bus company, on every (not all) route, has no direct competition at all. Want to get around Gloucester by bus? Your choice is Stagecoach or nothing.

This effectively means brand-led advertising (values, what you stand for, etc) for bus companies is a red herring of the highest order. They should all be trying to grow the market through product-led advertising. Grow the market for bus travel per se, and every bus company benefits from people switching from a journey previously planned by bike or car, or not planned at all.

Brand advertising is only really effective when the customer has a comparison to make.