Jan 26, 20172 min read

Is Your Brand In Retrograde?

When Price is Out of Alignment You Get “Retrograde Branding” & How to Make It Work For You!#Retrograde Branding = Price is out of alignment w/ the #brand perception spurring demand. Click To Tweet

There’s a run on Kirkland golf balls? What? You missed it?

Here’s the back story: Costco introduced private-labeled golf balls for just $1.25 per ball. For those of you duffers, that’s about 75% cheaper than the gold-standard balls made by Titleist. Adding to the intrigue, MyGolfSpy rated them just as good as their competitors. Voila! A retrograde brand was born and balls were swinging off of eBay for more than 5x the price!Why are @Costco golf balls flying off the shelf? #RetrogradeBranding Click To Tweet

So, what’s going on here? Retrograde Branding.

Let me give you a few more examples and you’ll get the idea. In 2011, Target partnered with high-fashion brand Missoni for a limited edition; it offered high-end Italian design for Tar-zhay pricing. Demand for the brand was so fierce that the website crashed! Again, pieces ended up selling for hundreds of dollars on resale sites.

And, Retrograde Branding reared its head again with the special collections by Lily Pulitzer, Rodarte, and Zac Posen.

H&M and even Kohl’s took a page from Target’s Retrograde Branding playbook to offer up joint collections with Roberto Cavalli, Narcisco Rodriguez, Kenzo, Alexander Wang, and others.#RetrogradeBranding boosts the credibility of the other products on the shelf Click To Tweet

Why? Because partners impart credibility onto the other products in the line. (“Wow; these shoes are so great, I should try the jacket!”) BUT, to pull off this type of branding requires 3 things:

A fabulous product
A ridiculously-great price
A trusted seller

I might sell the best BBQ ribs platter for $.89, but if my storefront is in the Mission District in Los Angeles, and I’ve never heard of the restaurant, it doesn’t work. If, however, the Los Angeles Times piped up and claimed it was worth schlepping across town and braving the location, then it might work. The publicity adds the missing trust factor.

How to Make Retrograde Branding Work for You!

Since most of you are like me, selling air, how do we apply the golf and clothing lessons? By introducing killer-good info products at a screaming fab price. It must be at a price point whereby the risk is minimalized.

Since I practice what I teach, I’m offering below my Instant Brand Boosters That Make You More Bucks for just $9.97! The code is RETRO. You just have until Friday, February 3 to nab your copy.

This webinar (with the slides, audio, and transcript!), delivers to you step-by-step ideas so that you:

Brand like a celebrity so that your name is on everyone’s lips
Leverage your brand name to increase recall
Master the 5 commandments of branding so that your biz and reach grows exponentially
Develop a proprietary vocabulary so that your brand DNA is projected at every opportunity
Build word-of-mouth buzz that really gives ‘em something to talk about.