FAIRFIELD, NJ— TeleBrands has launched a new flagship brand— Bulb Head— for all of its products in a move company CEO AJ Khubani said is aimed at building a long-term brand identity around “bright ideas” while reflecting television’s diminishing direct-response marketing influence.
The company started phasing in the BulbHead brand and logo on products in late 2015. The brand, supported by a corresponding website at BulbHead.com, reached broad retail distribution on the company’s diverse portfolio of products by the beginning of this year.
Khubani said the new brand reinforces the company’s founding goal more than 25 years ago of marketing “bright ideas” while unifying its advertising under a corporate brand more applicable to today’s diversified direct-response platforms.
“When we launched TeleBrands several years ago, we deliberately made every product the story and branded each product individually,” Khubani said. “Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve spent in advertising through the years with no long-term branding impact.”
“We wanted to come up with a brand that could cover everything we develop— and the one common theme is bright ideas,” Khubani continued. “Now for every new item by BulbHead we put in a TV commercial or on our website, we’re driving the sales of all BulbHead items.”
Khubani wants the BulbHead logo to achieve high consumer recognition in direct-response marketing, similar to the way logos of digital media giants such as Apple, Facebook and Twitter resonate with consumers.
“The symbol becomes the icon that people recognize without seeing the name of the brand,” he said.
The move away from TeleBrands
as a universal marketing identity, Khubani said, also reflects the surging influence of e-commerce and social media in a retail business model once driven almost exclusively by direct-response television.
“Television viewership is going down,” he said. “People are getting their content off of phones. Every year, TV as a percentage of our marketing budget is decreasing.”
He stressed the company remains committed to a robust TV media spend to supports its new products.
“We find that all the marketing we do, whether on TV or in social media, drives people to stores to buy the products,” he continued. “It’s not just going to be about the media we use to market the products. It’s about the type of products we’re marketing. We’re marketing bright ideas.”
