It's all about the brand

In a congested marketplace, a strong brand presence can be the difference between success and failure. Christian Doherty get to grips with how branding actually works.

Defining what a brand does and why it matters is one of the more pressing questions for modern companies. But ask anyone in the industry what a brand actually is, and you’ll get any number of different answers.

Emma Anderson is a Senior Consultant at Guernsey-based Orchard PR – in her view, the brand is the public face of the company. “That involves everything from the name and the logo through to the culture of the business. It’s the ethos the business demonstrates through everything it does – from PR and advertising, to the way in which the individuals within that business conduct themselves,” she explains.

The increasing importance and profile of brands, and the industry that has grown up around advising companies on brand strategy, has led to a mistaken perception that a great brand can be created by simply coming up with a snazzy logo and tagline. Stories are rife of firms spending millions on a new logo that does little to enhance their standing or profile.

Probably most notable in the financial sector is Abbey National’s infamous rebrand to The Abbey in 2003 (prior to the company being bought by Banco Santander). An estimated £15 million was spent on a new logo and communications, with the catchphrase ‘Turning banking on its head’. Sadly, the only thing turned on its head was its business, which plummeted after the new approach, and range of products, was launched.

Even those brands that use customer insight and crowdsourcing can still get it wrong. US retailer Gap demonstrated the perils of ‘updating’ a classic. Its new logo, developed in part through garnering user feedback from social media, only survived a week after a torrent of criticism. “We’ve learned a lot in this process,” the company said. “And we did not go about this the right way. It wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowdsourcing.”

Getting it right

The issue of rebranding is a vexed one. David Cameron is often credited with making the Conservatives electable again by ‘detoxifying the brand’. But the party had just lost three elections in a row, and faced little choice – change or die. A similar crisis precipitated perhaps the most dramatic rebrand of all: that of Czech car maker Skoda.

A popular joke in the 1980s was: ‘Why does a Skoda have a heated rear windscreen? To keep your hands warm when you push it’. Becoming the first brand of car to have a whole joke book dedicated to its perceived shortcomings is an achievement of sorts. But when your brand is shorthand for a pile of junk, then a rebrand becomes a necessity.

In 1991, Skoda sold just 172,000 cars worldwide, but then it was bought out by perhaps the most brand-conscious of car makers – Volkswagen. VW quickly set about reinventing the Skoda brand with a series of campaigns designed to shift perceptions.

Central to the success of the rebrand – at least in the UK – was the use of humour. “You won’t believe it’s a Skoda. Honest.” Acknowledging the brand’s heritage and slyly undercutting it proved enormously successful. It didn’t hurt to play up the VW angle either, convincing many that they weren’t actually buying a Skoda, but a bargain VW.

It worked. Skoda enjoyed a significant rise in sales following the campaign and have continued to perform well since then – in 2010 they sold more than 750,000 cars. They have also continued to reinvent themselves, most notably with the recent campaign for the Fabia vRS , which ran the strapline ‘Made of meaner stuff’. It was dark and almost ‘sexy’ – certainly not the image of yesteryear.

Rebranding is one thing, but building a brand and keeping its profile high takes constant care and attention. In today’s global market, and with the proliferation of the internet, the challenge is even harder – not least because of an increased demand from the public – and shareholders – for companies to be more ethically aware.

Interbrand, the world’s leading brand consultancy, publishes its top 100 brands every year, and practically every company on it will be instantly recognisable around the world. Sitting atop the pile for 2011, and not for the first time, was Coca-Cola. Admittedly, Coke has had its problems over the years, not least when it tried to rebrand itself as New Coke (see right). But in its review of Coca-Cola, Interbrand demonstrates why a good brand is so much more than its logo and product.

“The Coca-Cola brand remains timeless yet relevant as it celebrates its 125th anniversary,” it says. “The company lives, and its brand and the overall equity of happiness come through at every touchpoint. It continues to receive enormous exposure through top-tier sponsorships, with popular events like the FIFA World Cup. Additionally, Coca-Cola ties itself closely with meaningful promotions relating to disaster relief, youth empowerment, and sustainability issues around the globe. This past year also saw the rollout of its PlantBottle, a sustainable and recyclable bottle made partially of plant material, which saw Heinz adopt the technology for ketchup bottles.”

The local view

Getting it right on a massive corporate scale is one thing, but what about when you’re operating from a relatively small jurisdiction? “It’s easy to talk about branding in terms of logo and advertising, but branding is as much about writing thought-leadership articles to demonstrate the will of the business as it is placing an advert in the local press,” says Emma Anderson. “And I would suggest there are a lot of businesses in the Channel Islands that see branding as almost a standalone thing, away from the business ethos.”

Indeed, standing out in a market like the Channel Islands is in some ways even more of a challenge. Ian Beresford is Head of Business Development at Collas Crill, the firm created out of a merger between Collas Day and Crill Canavan. It was his task, along with Marketing and Comms Manager Kate Kirk, to design a brand to both capture the new firm’s values and differentiate it from the crowd.

“The legal market is incredibly generic, and it’s a congested market in the Channel Islands, so you need to do something that gets you noticed,” he says. “Reputation is important, obviously, but for firms like ours, we wanted to offer something that stood us apart, and that’s where the visual branding came into play.”

To that end Collas Crill has re-branded and gone big on pink. So far the feedback has been positive, with the company making the shortlist for best brand strategy at the Jersey Chartered Institute of Marketing Awards – the only professional services firm to do so.

Another Channel Island firm, wealth managers Hawksford International, recently underwent a brand revamp using customer feedback. Rebecca Stannard runs marketing and comms at the firm, and commissioned the research to confirm whether a rebrand was needed, and to find out what it should cover.

“Firstly we dropped the ‘International’ and built everything on the feedback we received. It revealed people didn’t know what our full capabilities were – we weren’t communicating what we did well enough. Now we list all our services on all marketing material. And we built the brand image on people – not generic images of the sea, which you often see.”

The Hawksford rebrand didn’t involve radical and risky reimagining of its image in the way Skoda’s did. It was a fine-tuning of the firm’s existing values – playing up its capabilities while putting space between itself and the competition.

For Hawksford, and indeed many other similar firms engaged in rebranding, only time will tell how well it’s worked. But one thing is for certain: in this day and age, getting your branding right is more important than ever.

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