The Brand called Glass

This was an interesting choice for my project.

Although my FE is the company Owens-Illinois (O-I) - leading manufacturer of glass containers in the world - the brand is really 'glass'. Branding the company O-I or a commodity product with very little diferentiation that O-I delivers i.e. bare glass bottle in a B2B business is probably a tougher task than reaching out to the consumer with the story and image of glass as a brand for healthy and environment-friendly choice. As a market leader in terms of volume and revenue, O-I stands to reap the most benefits of increased sales of glass and it only helps to build it as a brand. Further, the end product of the beverage is delivered to the marketplace by the beverage companies (Pepsi, Coca Cola, etc.), the consumer really does not care which company created the bottle the beverage came in (no one is going to lift the bottle and look for the little O-I punt mark). However, the bottle being a glass bottle has tremendous opportunity in terms of visual equity. All these considerations strengthen to build the brand of glass as opposed to the company that produces it.

Any dissenters to this reasoning..... ? I guess you could argue that why does then Intel follow its branding strategy as a company (being in a B2B business setting as well) - I would then say that microprocessors have many more search attributes that are differentiating than a bare glass bottle and hence make the case for building the brand around the company that produces it since it can try to differetiate itself on those attributes.