The name “Oscar Mayer” and the food hotdogs aren’t things that naturally correlate, but I bet you immediately think of hotdogs (or specifically, “wieners”) when you read or hear “Oscar Mayer”. If not wieners, bologna.
Oscar Mayer’s success is based simply on standing out from the crowd. Before the Oscar Mayer company was named, the founding brothers already had a quality product. People were willing to line up for various types of wieners, including bratwurst, from the Mayers.
It wasn’t too long before their products were marked with the Oscar Mayer name, but the name itself wasn’t what made a difference. It was the actions that the Oscar Mayer business was doing. When Oscar Mayer started to use a yellow label with their brand name, nobody had been doing that. Meats were bulk sold with little difference between packing. When Oscar Mayer started pre-slicing bacon, nobody was doing that. You had to get a hunk of meat sliced at the counter. Oscar was even at the front of the line to be inspected and federally approved when the federal inspection program was started. When you purchased meat from the market, Oscar Mayer products were an obvious choice. The introduction of the Wienermobile and the songs that even today people still hear and recognize are the front end of many years of good branding. And Oscar Mayer is still has a strong brand today.
Oscar Mayer’s branding success is something that affiliate marketers can learn from. Meat is not a particularly rare commodity, even though it can be expensive compared to other foods. However, the Mayers took a common product, provided the best, and then through a series of seemingly simple, but highly innovative measures, got to the top of their market.
1. Choose a high quality product.
Good branding didn’t make the Oscar Mayer products good, the good products made the Oscar Mayer branding work.
2. Know your competition.
When the Mayer brothers got started, meat packaging was pretty bland and rather unmarked. They realized this was not beneficial.
3. Find ways to do things better, no matter how small.
Changing a product label is, to be quite honest, as small thing. But in the situation of Oscar Mayer, it made a huge difference.
4. Stick with it.
Throughout all of the marketing, the core of Oscar Mayer hasn’t changed that much. They have continued to provide good products that people do love and to innovate.
There is one thing that Oscar Mayer didn’t do. The Mayers didn’t decide it was enough to simply place their name on a package and call it good. They acted to make the Mayer name mean something.
If all your brand consists of is a portrait of yourself, and no actions towards making it mean something, you will only have as much success as the businesses Oscar Mayer overtook. Consider how hard to you have to think or search to come up with one of Oscar Mayer’s early competitors. Then ask yourself if you really want people to have to look that hard to find you.
