Millennials distrust big brands. This is why every millennial’s favorite coffee shop is the little ma and pa store down on the corner—the one with mismatching mugs, upcycled furniture, and edgy artwork. Artisanal coffee makers, with their local, organic, and fair trade beans, are preferred to Starbucks. While the atmosphere and the quality of the coffee are more or less the same, this new wave of consumers will always choose the quirky café with the tattooed barista over the big brand.
Brandless™, an online grocery store, has figured out how to harness this new age corporate backlash into a lucrative business that brands themselves as non-branded. Their secret? They exclude brand labels from all their products and set every price to just three dollars.
They claim that by eliminating brand names from their product they have cut out the BrandTax™, a clever term they invented. In the eyes of a hipster, they seem to have found the loophole in every millennial’s enemy—capitalism.
Through sly wordplay they’ve painted a picture for the hipster millennial of a company that has broken free from the societal chains of big brand names, all while appealing to their cost savvy nature.
Consumers see themselves as part of the product’s rebellion and appreciate the transparency in the labeling. Brandless™ reflects the millennial’s emphasis on uniqueness and individuality, as well as other trends they seek out while shopping.
Brandless™ has captured the hipster, counterculture movement into a white, square label and fed it back to the millennial. Business speaker Libby Gill, the branding brain behind the Dr. Phil Show, believes that a brand is a reputation, an expectation the consumer associates with a product. Brandless™ has produced this with their uniform labels, simplistic look, and elaborate creation story.
Brandless™ created their backstory to help market their off-brand simplicity. The term BrandTax™ was coined to suggest to their consumer that Brandless™ has evaded some corporate tax that companies pay in order to have the prestige of a brand name.
In reality, this word is referring to the middlemen that most companies use for distributing and retail sales. While they are saving money by cutting out extraneous hands, their ability to sell everything for three dollars is attributed to a simple price point that every product is manufactured under. By eliminating the markups from distributors and the retailers Brandless™ saves themselves and their consumers money.
As branding expert Daymond John said when determining the worth of a company, ‘How is this different than anything else in the marketplace?’”
Answer: While the principles behind the business are fairly traditional, Brandless™ has taken an innovative approach to their marketing strategy, setting them apart from their competitors.
They took the millennials’ interest in anti-branding, that so many companies are currently struggling with, and turned it into their own personal brand.
While they aren’t reinventing the wheel, it sure may seem like they are, and in the end that’s what branding is all about.
