What are the brand associations and market strategies for each product?
Brands represent more than the product itself: they stand for performance’s expectation, emotional attributes
and are able to give information about the product and about the company (what the company is and what it
offers). They existing in the consumers’ minds and represent what the product means to them. Brand
associations are achieved by advertisement, quality of product, price, competitors’ moves, celebrities
associations, and word of mouth communications among others.
Slanket began its market strategy by collect data from people close to Gary Clegg such as friends and
relatives to understand its potential. After being exposed to encouraging comments, the Clegg brothers
embraced this project and started to design the guidelines that would follow Slanket through the way: it
would be a high priced quality product promoted by word of mouth (online and personal) and by public
relations (radio and newspapers) because they were short on money due to the fact they were a small
business that started from scratch based on the brothers’ savings. After this, Slanket was able to sell its
products to an in-flight catalog sales company and also got the chance to sell them in QVC, a television
shopping channel. Slanket was a hit until 2008 when Snuggie appeared.
Snuggie entered the market by the hands of Allstar Marketing Group, an infomercial marketing firm, with
the goal of stealing business from Slanket by introducing the same item, with lower quality and lower price.
Besides this distinction, their marketing budget and channels were quite different because Snuggie had 10
million dollars to use just for promotion activities and has the advantage of being owned by a company with
experience and proven successes on this kind of products advertised on television that used used in Snuggies
best interest.
The introduction of Snuggie in the market was a huge hit and decreased the sales’ volume of Slanket and also
started a wave of reaction by consumers that altered the existing brand associations. Parody videos began to
appear in the internet, expressing people’s opinion that using a Snuggie made people look bad and funny in a
