Brand Unawareness

A fellow shopping for auto insurance asked an unusual question: what repair shop would we use in his location for body work.   Some years ago, he had an accident and was sent to a shop that did rather a poor job, leaving him so displeased that he changed insurance companies.   And then, when he had another claim, the new insurance company sent his car to the very same body shop for repairs, and he was again disappointed.  He wanted to change insurers again, but wanted to make sure that the new company would not send him back to the same shop.

In the years I spent in the insurance business, I had listened in on many phone calls – a few hundred or so – and this is the only one I can recall in which a shopper took this level of interest in our suppliers.   Everyone cared about the price, and to a lesser degree about the kinds of coverage that price included, but nobody seemed particularly curious about exactly how the benefit of the product would be delivered: what company is really going to do the work that they are paying for in advance?

There are many buying situations in which consumers are unaware of the brands they are purchasing when the company with which they are directly transacting is merely passing on the product of another firm.   No insurance company, to my knowledge, has a nationwide network of repair centers that it owns and controls, but sends claimants to a local provider.   And where the product is a good rather than a service, the invisibility of its providers is clear: you have no idea what brands you are consuming when you order a meal in a restaurant, nor what company refined the copper in your computer.  You are only aware of the brand of the seller, not the maker.

And in the present day, where most firms are vertically dis-integrated and business operations are outsourced, chances are that when you consume any product, you are consuming dozens or hundreds of brands that you are not aware of.   The more complex the product, the more hidden brands you are consuming without being aware.  I would venture a guess that no-one, ever, has investigated the full supply chain of every product they use – there simply isn’t enough time in the day.

That’s not to say that the brand of a supplier is of no value – it is of great value to their direct customer, the reseller, though invisible to the ultimate consumer.  And in this space, the values of the reseller are significantly different: is the supplier reliable, will delivery be timely, is the quality of goods consistent, and so on.   These are entirely different to the values that customers espouse, or pretend to espouse, in evaluating the brand of the reseller.   They are generally concerned only with the last link in the supply chain.