Does a brand provide any value for a local business? [closed]

If I went up to Helsinki for a project, I didn't know where to go for dinner at the first night. So i thought: lets ask these people for the next McDonald.

Not that I like McD too much, but I trusted to know what I eat. I even knew how it would taste. And at the evening I didn't want surprises.

Along my way to McD I saw many smaller opportunities to have some dinner. Fastfood, slow food whatever. I didn't choose them even when they looked good - I just wanted no surprises and the the used level of quality.

If you go into a shoe store and want some running shoes, you probably take out Adidas/Puma/Nike at the first glance. If you don't know about the expert shoes, because you are a novice, you simply take Adidas.

These are benefits you get from a brandmark.

On the other hand, if I hear that McDonalds is doing something worse with the salads, I will not go to a McD in whole germany just because of that. That is probably the downside.

Anyway - I find brands important. Sometimes they are useless. Sometimess not. If you want to make huge business, the you should have one - like Apple. The ten hardware stores can not compete with Apple. But if they would have a fancy name like X9 and would start selling exclusive hardware, they might have a chance (ok not really in apples case).

Some of the brands we know have grown. I am not an expert but maybe you should read some books of the wellknown brandcreators. I highly assume that there were a time were they just did high quality with a cooperate design. And then later decided to put money in the trademark. And now- I don't think Apple does invest to much in the trademark. The products and the stores and whatever speaks for itself. They probably invest more money into trademark protection ;-)

That being said I am not a marketing expert. I was just surprised about the question. For me it was never a question if trademark yes / no. each product I sell is a trademark and I want to get it big. I cannot imagine you can create a huge business without a huge trademark. You friend has several small trademarks giving good revenue - what would happen if he would create a brandmark and give out franchise options?

I think you might be missing a little bit of the value of a brand - it's not just that you expect a particular type of experience (like similar food) no matter where you go (for a restaurant) or what you buy (for some object). It's also that you know there's some guarantee about what it WON'T be, because there's someone behind that brand that will ensure a minimum of some type.

For example, bathrooms. Go to any McDonalds, and you can expect it won't be a scarring experience; go into some hole-in-the-wall diner or something, and you have NO IDEA what you'll find. I've had to take my kids to bathrooms at some decent restaurants and found a shared, single-toilet mess that I almost wouldn't let my kids into. McDonald's seems to take that pretty seriously, sending people in there all the time, and I imagine they've got some sort of surprise inspectors that come around checking stuff like that just to make sure it's up to the "McDonalds experience".

Consumables like shoes are a little different, maybe because there's not as much you can really screw up - they fall apart, you don't get e. coli or something. But I think the lesson here is really that depending on what your product or service is, the more of an "experience" you're providing, the more important that branding is, because people know there's a floor to how bad it could possibly be, unlike what you might find at a family-owned biz of some type. Just my quick thoughts off the top of my head. Hope it helps you out!