Many marketers will say that establishing a strong brand image is essential to building and maintaining a robust customer base.
But do customers always associate a particular brand identity with the benefits they need to derive from a class of product - and the business enhancements these products are expected to deliver?
According to Mark Lu, CEO of Rectron, one of SA`s largest components distributors, big brand image is not all it`s purported to be by the marketing theorists.
"The images customers associate with particular brands - whether their perceptions are experience-based or not - do have an influence on their purchasing behaviour," he says.
"However, at Rectron we have always believed in the power of the `no-name brand` or the `white box` when it comes to personal computers, servers and even notebook PCs," he says.
"From a company perspective, the white box concept gives us the flexibility to change specifications and components at will for the ultimate benefit of the customer - either in terms of product quality, performance or from an ease of upgrade point of view."
Lu says Rectron`s white box marketing strategy has served the company well, in that it has given it the freedom to access and adopt the "latest and greatest" components as they arrive on the market.
He notes that - paradoxically - Rectron has been assisted in its efforts to achieve marketplace acceptance for its white box products by the "big brand" vendors themselves.
"Currently, most of the multinational, corporate vendors seem to be embroiled in a protracted price war and are pitting one big brand name up against another in a seemingly pointless contest to try and gain market share by hitting the lowest price point," says Lu.
"With prices of these products falling fast, the vendors are naturally loathe to raise their value by enhancing specifications. This has opened the door for Rectron and other white box players to gradually upgrade storage capacities, add more memory, incorporate faster CPUs, and introduce more powerful graphics into their machines.
"As a result, these machines are now viewed by the market as true `value for money` offerings."
Lu says good examples of this situation can be found in the mobile computing arena.
"This is one of the biggest growth sectors in SA," he says. "Probably because of this reality, we have noticed a more frenzied approach to marketing by many of the big brand vendors who are pitching laptop PCs at price points as low as R6 999, R5 999 and even R4 999.
"At these prices, the machines can be nothing more than entry-level offerings. There is seemingly no focus on the more upmarket machines that the corporate market really wants.
"I believe that it is important to offer customers real value for money, which is found in productivity and efficiency enhancing features such as longer battery life, better graphics, wireless enablement and so on. These are not found on today`s branded R4 999 machines," he stresses.
Illustrating this, Lu says that both Nvidia and ATI - graphics card manufacturers - are offering new technology for mobile PCs targeted at the business buyers, which is being largely ignored by brand name vendors.
"Their technology, which is available for many existing PCs in OEM and upgradable form, seems to have escaped brand name vendor attention," he says.
"So - ironically - while most vendors are slashing prices to gain market share, their activities have actually created more room at the upper end of the market, together with the opportunity for greater margins, for the white box players."
Lu adds that big brands will always be important to the market. But when vendors lose their way, and lose touch with their markets, their brands will become tarnished - and they inevitably hand white box resellers the advantage.
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