There are many objects out there that you can instantly spot, and you instantly associate the idea of quality to them. And this isn’t a marketing issue; there are things that money dumped into advertising can’t buy. For example, no matter how hard they try, people will never think McDonald’s is a quality restaurant or that Coca-Cola is a healthy drink. Some car companies, like Hyundai or Skoda, even tried to detach themselves from the image of “cheap cars”, but are just now beginning to be seen as having at least grounds for being considered a quality investment.
On the other end of the quality spectrum is, for example, Mercedes. And, like we said, it’s not a matter of having a good marketing department making claims of grandeur. Brands like Mercedes are timeless and have provided the consumer with quality products since day one. This is brand value, something that you know you’re probably paying extra for because it has a certain brand name, but that you don’t mind doing so because you know the name is synonymous with quality.
A similar success case, although in a somewhat different level, is ghd and its hair straighteners. The brand has also provided the consumer with quality since its beginnings, and has been rewarded for doing so. If you look up ghd hair styles you will find out that the brand has gone past its own name into something that seeps into the collective imagination of people. Just like a vacuum cleaner is a “hoover” and a copy machine is a “Xerox machine”, beautiful, straightened hair is becoming “ghd hair”.
And this is really amazing if you consider how long the brand has been in the market. You would say that good advertising and celebrity endorsement made ghd the popular brand what it is today, but even before this happened there was already a ghd hair straightener in every teenager’s home – or almost. The celebrity endorsements, as a matter of fact, appeared naturally, as some British celebrities simply declared that they loved the hair styling tool.
Most people discovered the ghd straightener the same way that my family did: a friend was so excited about getting one and how well it worked that she couldn’t wait to show all her friends. And that’s the advertising you want: the one that you hardly have to pay for, and the one that really displays quality.