There was a time, going back at least 70 years, when all it took to be successful in business was to make a product of good quality. If you offered good coffee, whiskey or beer, people would come to your shop and buy it. And as long as you made sure that your product quality was superior to the competition, you were pretty much set. Well into the 1970s, a savvy consumer could distinguish between high-quality and shabby products quite easily. Read more.
And yet, as much as we like to complain about what we buy, it remains a fact that we live in a golden age for quality products. Today, it is much more rare to find cars that consistently break down or kiddie pools that leak. I challenge you to walk into any supermarket and find a product that is not of almost equal quality to the category leader in terms of functional performance. Nevertheless, the companies that were category leader in the early days often still are today. Some represent the “foundational brands,” the companies that in the 1950s and 1960s epitomized the kind of smart marketing that is now ubiquitous. A handful of these marketing leaders are listed in the gallery below. And the reason they have survived the test of time comes down to the discipline of marketing and branding.
