The product is the channel: rethinking where brand communication happens

Nearly all brand communication happens in space you rent. Advertising slots, social feeds, inboxes, shelf position: borrowed, priced by the impression, and switched off the moment you stop paying.

The one piece of media you own outright is the product itself, sitting in somebody’s kitchen or garage or hand for the next several years. Almost nobody uses it.

A campaign runs for six weeks. A kettle lasts eight years.

Put the two side by side and the comparison is uncomfortable.

Every column favours the product. The reason brands still spend the other way is not stupidity. It is that until recently there was no practical way to send a message through a physical object once it had left the warehouse.

Why brands go quiet after the sale

If you sell through retail, wholesale, a distributor or a marketplace, you do not find out who bought your product. The shop knows. The marketplace knows. You have a sales figure and a reasonable guess.

So the relationship ends at the till, and the only tools left are the ones that ask the customer for a favour first: register your product, join the scheme, download the app, hand over your email. Response rates tell you how that bargain lands.

None of this is new. What is new is that the gap is now closable without asking the customer for anything at all. A tag in the product or its packaging is read by any modern phone with a tap. No app, no download, no form.

What actually changes when the object becomes the channel

Three things, and they are all about context rather than reach.

Timing. You are talking to somebody who is holding the thing. Not scrolling past it, not being retargeted for it a week later. Holding it.

Relevance. The tag identifies that individual item, not the product line. So what appears can differ by where the item is, how old it is and what has already happened to it. On the shelf it says one thing. In the kitchen the day after purchase it says something else. Two years later, when it needs a part or a refill, something else again. The brand controls all of it and can change it at any time.

Permission. A tap is a deliberate act. The customer starts the conversation, which puts this in a different category from every channel that has to interrupt someone to work.

Four things brands have put on a product

The useful version of this is rarely a brand film.

A beer pump clip. Atom Brewing Co, a Hull brewery, launched a tagged pump clip in April 2024. Tap the clip at the bar and you get what you are drinking, who brewed it and where the next one is being poured. It works because the moment of interest is genuine: pint in hand, mildly curious, five seconds spare.

A honey jar that counts its own refills. The jar knows it has been refilled eleven times, shows the carbon saved by doing it and credits twenty pence towards the next one. The product is running its own retention programme.

A bike with a theft record. The owner flags it stolen. Anyone who taps it before buying it second hand sees the warning and is asked to call 101. The brand communication here is a service, and it follows the item to its second and third owner.

A whisky cask. Fill cycles, warehouse location and movement history, held against the individual cask. That one is not consumer marketing at all, which is rather the point: the same channel carries a different job.

“Our product is too boring for this”

Boring products are usually the better candidates.

Anything consumable has a refill moment. Anything mechanical has a spare part moment. Anything expensive gets resold, and the second owner is a customer you never met. Anything with a warranty has a registration problem you are currently solving with a card in the box that nobody posts.

Interesting products need a reason for people to keep paying attention. Boring ones already have one, because at some point the customer needs something and goes looking. Being the thing they find is the entire opportunity.

The cost is not the tag

This is where these projects go wrong, so it is worth being blunt.

The tag is cheap and getting cheaper. The platform is a known quantity. The expensive part is having something worth saying, and having somebody whose job it is to keep changing it.

A channel nobody updates is a leaflet. It gets one read and then it is dead weight on your packaging. The brands that get value from this treat the product page the way they treat their homepage: owned, maintained, seasonal, measured.

That is a modest ongoing commitment, and it is the honest price of the channel. Worth knowing before anyone signs off a tag order.

Where to start

Not with technology, and not with a platform demo. With one sentence you should be able to finish today.

In the first week of owning this product, the single most useful thing we could tell somebody is …

If you can complete that sentence, you have the beginnings of a brand communication strategy that does not expire when the campaign does. If you cannot, more media will not help, because the problem is not distribution.

Veribli puts a tag into the product or its packaging and gives you control of what the customer sees when they tap it, changeable whenever you like without going back to a developer. The technology grew out of a system that tracked over 900 million refillable containers through a circular supply chain, so we have spent nearly thirty years watching what happens to physical things after they leave the factory.