Supermarkets may be forced to remove 'copycat' products following the legal victory by a small British fish business in winning an injunction against Aldi, causing the retailer to remove its ‘Saucy Salmon Fillets’ from sale following complaints from the Saucy Fish Company.
This breakthrough injunction represents what appears to be a fundamental change in legal stance from ‘intent’ to ‘effect’ in the case of products attempting to take a short-cut into product recognition.
In other words, the legal spotlight moves from intent of the perpetrator in designing a pack description -difficult to prove - to assessing the effect on the shopper, which can be easier to measure in terms of volume of shopper complaints…
However, as all brand owners know, a complaint by a consumer represents merely the tip of a reaction-iceberg, so the negative impact of a ‘short-change’ issue should not be judged on the basis of the number of complaints that reach the ‘Customer Relations’ desk. Instead, a factor of 10++ might usefully be applied to try to guage the extent of the damage done to the wrongdoer’s brand equity…
Moreover, taking another lesson from the brand-owner’s manual, when a consumer gets more than they expect from a brand, they tell one friend, when ‘short-changed’ they try to inform 10+… And given current levels of access to social media, the consequences are hopefully obvious…
Yesterday’s ruling represents a dilemma for retailers in that they still need to find a way of helping the consumer to recognise and position the product, without incurring the cost, risk and need to exceed ROI hurdle-rates of normal brand building.
Perhaps the way forward for retailers is to focus on a combination of heavy corporate proposition-building - a guarantee that you always get more than you expect - and providing a clear definition of category, and the retailer’s contribution to that category in terms of their own product…
In other words, the retailer is offering a product solution in the category that uses the retail ‘brand’ to provide reassurance to shoppers that need confirmation of a trusted retailer’s endorsement of what they have chosen to purchase.
This is patently easier in the case of normal private label such as Tesco/Sainsbury's/Asda/Morrisons’ brand, than with surrogate label products such as Smiths coffee for Aldi/Lidl, etc.
However, whilst a bad experience with a private label can reflect negatively on the retailer, disappointment in a surrogate label can be dismissed as resulting from a rogue ‘supplier’ that can be replaced with a product more in keeping with the retailer's norms…
Meanwhile, as always, given that it can be better to act before consumers demand change, retailers might be well advised to now ‘step back and look at themselves’, moving their perspective from ‘intent’ to ‘effect’ in making changes to their product packaging, before the consumer-shopper does it on their behalf…
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