I'm refering to the wheels in my head. They're spinning today with ideas that are 75% of the way developed but not "quite" there. Today was a big production day in my workspace but the production I was doing was elementary at best. It's the type of production that you'd pay the lowest level line employee to do because it's completely unskilled. Unfortunately the lowest paid employee right now - and also the only employee - is me. So I spent 8+ hours doing very very brainless work.
It's not nearly as bad as it sounds. Sometimes I enjoy the fact that I'm able to get work done but give my brain a break. Sometimes I'd rather be doing this type of work then QuickBooks :). And sometimes, like today, this type of work enables me to tune out and think about other areas of the business.
So this is what got me thinking (amongst other things). Pros and cons of trying to work with an established company to do private label for them. They're not in my industry but there are some similarities between our company's with regards to mission, quality, etc that I could see it making sense. Plus, given who their audience is, I could see this audience being interested in said new product. But....I just don't know. Anyone have any thoughts or experience with private label?
2 comments:
Private label's a good way to make money when you're smaller. You can leverage someone else's marketing budget and client list. But it can come back to bite you in the butt when you get bigger.
My company, with no brand recognition, whitelabeled for a company with a lot of brand recognition early in our existence. We're still saddled with that partnership. In a way, it's good, because they're better at web marketing than we are. But they drive 90% of traffic through our online platform, so we're very dependent on them -- not good now that we're bigger, have been bought, and have big expansion plans of our own. We bent over backward to customize for them, and it's a problem now, because the online platform we created for them looks nothing like ours (and I mean NOTHING -- we totally customized) but on the back end it's linked to our branded platform. So every time we want to introduce a new feature or launch into a new country we have to bring them along but it's a ton of work from a partnership and a dev standpoint.
Moral of the story? Don't customize too much -- if you can, slap a different label on your existing product and that's it. If you customize too much, they'll get used to it, and when you get bigger, that can be a painful legacy.
Other thought: think hard about what your goals are. Are you just after revenue, and not as interested in brand building? Is it more important to build your client list with a big name than to build a consumer brand? Or is your brand awareness a primary consideration for you?
Of course, there are some halfway houses between a pure whitelabel and your own brand. You can do a "powered by" sort of thing (that's actually what we have with the partner I'm discussing, although it's so small that customers barely notice). You can do a co-brand, etc.
Some thoughts...
Muchos Gracias Ockeghem - the co-branding is something else I'm toying with as well and may ultimately be the better way to go.
Post a Comment