A Branding Origin Story

The summers before and after my first year of college, I worked as a cashier at Drug Emporium just eight miles outside northeast Philadelphia. It was a great job for a girl who went through a lot of hair products.

Drug Emporium was huge — a grocery-sized Walgreens meets Ulta Beauty. I loved having access to such a wide variety of products. It’s also the origin of my fascination with branding.

Faced with so many choices I became a label reader. I discovered that most shampoos had the same top ingredients. What distinguished all these bottles of sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate was packaging, enticing blurbs, and scents. Branding made them appear different when in fact they all did the same thing using essentially the same main ingredients. This is when I realized just how powerful branding could be. It turned a few ingredients into hundreds of different products at vastly different price points. My journey into marketing had begun.

What brands first caught your eye? If you have a product or service, does it convey the message you want to your intended audience? And are you conveying it consistently throughout your various channels? Conducting a marketing audit is a great tool to help document and track your branding. It’s actually one of my favorite things to do. Now that I think of it; it may remind me of exploring all those different brands in the Drug Emporium aisle.