Branded, Part 2

My girls Heidi and Cece were good enough to fill me in on the idea that it’s the quality of a Coach handbag that has caused women all over the world to fork over the moolah to own one. While I appreciate the response, I really don’t think that it’s just the quality of the bag that makes women gaga over these bags. There is a very strong emotional appeal for these bags as well, and it’s much harder for Coach fans to qualify that emotional appeal than it is to qualify the craftsmanship that goes into manufacturing a Coach bag.

Have you ever observed a group of women talk about handbags? One of the women mentions Coach, and a dreamy look falls over the eyes of the rest of them women, and they say “Ooooh! Coach!” Or “That is such a cute bag! It’s Coach? Ooooh!” It’s this very response that manufacturers and marketers dream about. Not only do marketers want the public to know that their brand is available but they strive for the public to have a positive attitude about the brand. It’s this positive attitude that makes people wait in line for four hours on the day the new iPhone hit the stores. It’s this positive attitude that makes women gaze longingly at a Coach bag.

So, why Coach and not some other brand? I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s this very phenomenon that has fascinated me all through my marketing career and through grad school as well. Marketers take classes in consumer behavior to try to understand the motivations behind the consumer and then align their marketing strategy with what they’ve learned about the behaviors of their target audience. Over the years companies have tried to develop a favorable attitude toward their brand by tying the company with a cause or a concept. For example, Coca Cola launched their fruit drink “Fruitopia” to compete with the popularity of Snapple by using creative packaging and naming the drinks silly names. And Fruitopia was wildly popular until another marketing campaign for bottled water told people that the ingredients in Fruitopia were crap and people stopped buying the drink.

If you take a utilitarian look at a purse, it is something to use when you are walking around and you have stuff you want to bring with you. Ultimately that is what a Coach bag is, a vessel with which one carries around their stuff. Coach hit the marketing formula nail on the head and caused women all over the world to view this handbag as something more than a basic bag used for carrying stuff. Coach understands that women develop strong attachments to the thing they use to carry their stuff, and they have come up with a way to sell this very basic item to the people and to conjure strong emotions about it.

I am not saying that women who buy Coach bags are suckers. I know loads of women who have bought these bags. I also know loads of women, like me, who cannot be bothered to buy a Coach bag. I often wonder what the difference is between the Pro-Coach group, the Anti-Coach group, and the Ambivalent-Toward-Coach brand. Is there some kind of magic trait that the Pro-Coach group has that the others do not? And I suspect the Coach marketing department knows what that trait is.