The Brand Observer

Love it - the other black stuff

2009-11-06T11:30:00.002Z

Escaping from Uniqlo down Regent Street I was surprised to see the new pop-up Marmite shop. I love it. Taking the product to the people in a retail brand experience. Marmite, Marmite crisps, Marmite clothes and Marmite memorabilia. Not sure why you need Marmite memorabilia, as it is a hard taste to forget, and readily available in every high street super-market. Nevertheless, there are Marmite mugs and Marmite fridge magnets. They are even opening a Marmite café upstairs, for a warming cup of tea and Marmite sandwich on a cold day.

Lost in the Black Stuff

2009-11-06T11:20:00.002Z

Long long ago, when politicians always told the truth about the pounds in our pockets, I started spending my paper-round money in public houses. Guinness was my drink of choice. Sometimes with a dash of blackcurrant to sweeten it for my youthful taste, sometimes without. My mother didn’t approve of adolescent drinking, but she made some accommodation for the well-advertised fact that ‘Guinness is Good for You’.

I have been a big fan of Guinness advertising ever since. ‘Big Wave’, ‘Surfer’ and ‘Noitulove’ are classic film shorts in their own right. And as a short film, I love the new spot “bring it to life”. The photography is superb, and recognisably Guinness. http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/theWork/news/964790/Guinness-bring-life-AMV-BBDO/

However, I am worried that Guinness’ marketers, or their advertising advisers, are losing the plot. I am at a loss to understand the film’s relevance to the product or the company. Arthur Guinness didn’t create the world, plant forests or fields. Ireland was already pretty green when he created Guinness. And if it is suggesting the Guinness drinkers will magically acquire god-like powers then it is in much greater risk of over-promising than the 1970s Smirnoff adverts.

Top Marks for Brands

2009-11-06T11:00:00.000Z

It is great to see that Marks & Spencer are going to stock top brands in their stores in addition to their own brand products. As a customer, it means that I should be able to satisfy my children’s demands for Heinz Ketchup and Nutella as well as my wife’s requests for M&S quality salads and staples. It overcomes my frustration that I can’t fulfil my shopping list with the products I want in one store if that store is M&S.

As a commentator on branding it reconfirms my belief that good strong brands create demand. Whilst it might have taken 125 years for the good managers of Marks to fully appreciate that people don’t just want washing-up liquid, they want Fairy liquid, it is good that they have at last. A good thing for M&S, a good thing for the brands they will stock, a good thing for the customers, and a good thing for branding.

Brand valuation comes of age

2009-10-22T17:10:00.001+01:00

I just attended the Brand Finance Workshop at the lovely Arts Club on Dover Street. An odd juxtaposition of the latest hard-nosed financial analysis being presented in rooms decorated by and for creative artists of the past.

What was to me most interesting was the rather technical discussion of the new international standard for brand valuation, ISO 10668, which should come into force in the new year. It was interesting not so much in its detail, but because it took place. Brand valuation is no longer an esoteric tool, the validity of which is doubted by people who don’t understand it, but an accepted piece of analysis, with rules and definitions that have been argued and agreed by experts from around the world.

It was presented by David Haigh, the CEO of Brand Finance, who was the UK representative on the technical drafting group – so arguably the leading expert on brand valuation in the country. His presentation was very clear, but too comprehensive to go into here, so I would recommend to anyone interested that they contact him for more information or a brand valuation.

Starbucks Via Tallinn

2009-05-20T20:18:00.002+01:00

“Its quite nice, and it does taste like Starbucks actually” said Bindal, who was next to me on the flight to Estonia, on her way to Ulan Bator in Mongolia via Tallin, St Petersburg and the Trans Siberian railway.

It was the first time that Paul, my Creative Director and I had tried the Starbucks instant coffee, and we had some trepidation. Why would Starbucks, with a brand built around a coffee-bar experience, the ‘third place’, put its name to an instant coffee which could be drunk in much less comfortable environments? Other brand commentators have suggested that this could be a mistake. They imagined lonely people drinking instant Starbucks in untidy bedsit kitchens, and felt that the negative associations would weaken the brand.

However, it has long been possible to get a take-away Starbucks, to be drunk in whatever environment one was rushing to. (If you weren’t in a rush, why wouldn’t you stop and relax over your coffee). So many untidy bedsits must already be littered with empty Starbucks cups: perhaps they are just reminders of the comfort that the coffee can bring.

Anyway, back to the plane to Tallinn. We tried both the regular Colombian and the stronger Italian blend of Starbucks Via and we were pleasantly surprised. Not only was it some of the best instant coffee we could recall, but it distinctly tasted like Starbucks. I don’t know why, but it did. This was not only a credit to the brand, but distinctly enhanced the EasyJet experience. To find that there can be everyday luxuries even in budget airtravel was an unexpected little pleasure. And my Starbucks brand loyalty is therefore, if anything, a little increased.

Believing in brands, not banks

2009-05-18T10:51:00.003+01:00

The reports that Virgin is looking to follow Tesco into on-line retail banking ( www.brandrepublic.com today) should be no surprise, unless perhaps that it has taken so long. The main retail bank brands are currently weakened by their perceived parts in the credit crisis (see "Banking on brands" below. People need to have a bank, but probably see them as all being as to a greater or lesser degree guilty of having taken excess risks, which would account for switching not being higher. So now is the right time for these two of the most trusted brands in Britain to offer banking.

Of course, not all trusted brands are trusted in ways that would enable them to successfully offer retail banking services - Cadbury is trusted for its chocolate, and Head & Shoulders for haircare, but we don't typically judge our banks on sweetness nor lack of dandruff. However, there are levels of generic trust that really strong brands generate that do transcend categories, as Tesco has proved by moving across so many, even becoming the most trusted petrol retailer in the 2009 Readers Digest survey of Britain's most trusted brands, ahead of BP and Shell.

I remember being very sceptical (and very wrong) some 20 years ago about Virgin going into into Financial Services. Rowan Gormley was explaining to me over lunch how he had made the simple connection that the Virgin brand was a great asset because people trusted it - so it had real potential moving into markets where people didn't trust the existing brands, such as insurance. Virgin Direct was born, which became Virgin Money, and is still a success.

And people who trust brands generally believe that they are getting something good, even when they can't easily make comparisons. Virgin Mobile used to get considerably better customer ratings for its mobile network than T-Mobile did for its network. But they were both operating on the same network.

Sainsbury's Bank similarly used to benefit from a positive brand halo effect, in that it got significantly better customer satisfaction scores for its call centre service than Bank of Scotland did - for the same call centre. So we can expect customers to move to brands they trust, to expect to get better, more reliable services, and in the absence of information to the contrary, to believe that they are getting better service.

The owners of the leading brands generally understand brand risk, and the importance to all their businesses of not letting brand-loyal customers down. The FSA should recognise this, and issue them full banking licences as soon as possible, so that people can make real choices between truly different brands.

Banking on Brands

2009-04-01T21:29:00.004+01:00

Brands drive behaviour. They don’t just exist in peoples minds as a combination of images and expectations of the brand, but take fruit in terms of the actions people take because of their perceptions of a brand. And as the scriptures say, it is best to judge a tree by its fruit.

When there is a positive brand image, we can judge it in terms of the proportion of people who go out and buy and use the products or services associated with the brand, and the premiums that they are prepared to pay for it.

When there is a neutral brand image, we can record the inaction of shoppers who don’t bother to pick up the product, or to enter the store, and positively choose to go elsewhere, to select other brands.

The riots today at RBS in London show just how much adverse behaviour can be driven when there is a strongly negative brand. Few if any of these demonstrators will be personally acquainted with Sir Fred Goodwin. None of them will have had savings with RBS frozen or potentially lost, as they might have had with some Icelandic bank. Yet they were all galvanised into action by an image of RBS that they felt extremely dissatisfied with. Not just a loss of trust, but a very negative empathy.

The challenge for banking brands like RBS will be to redeem themselves with the mass of their customers and get a second chance. They have transgressed. They have been trusted partners who have mortgaged the family home to secretly buy a Ferrari to impress their associates, then lost everything.

They have made such huge losses that their credibility as financial advisers and stores of value is fundamentally weakened. To rebuild their brands they will need to show, through some positive actions, that they have repented their sins and are going to act in different ways in future. For this to be credible they will have to avoid future failings or acting in ways which, however legal and normal in the industry, might further reduce the trust of their clients and stakeholders. A brand like trust, hard and slow to build, and even harder to rebuild. But if the bank brands don’t swing from negative to positive, the credit crisis - being a crisis of confidence - will only deepen.

Reputation Value at Risk

2006-08-19T08:04:00.000+01:00

Recent surveys of the value of global brands, like the BusinessWeek/Interbrand survey published last month show that the amount of shareholder value attributable to companies’ brand reputations is enormous, often in the billions. For companies like Reuters or Burberry the value of their brand reputations can represent between 40-70% of the market cap. However, there is little data on how companies are managing the risks to their reputation - and a new survey shows that is perhaps because most companies are not managing their reputation risk.

This survey, designed and analysed by David Hensley & Garry Honey will be published in the forthcoming September edition of Strategic Risk magazine, shows that although 97% of the senior executives surveyed rated Reputation Risk an important or very great concern, the majority said they do not specifically monitor, measure or manage their reputational risk.

Given the value of intangibles, and reputation/goodwill in particular, this should be of concern to investors, including anyone with a pension fund investing in equities.

The fact that most people surveyed don’t explicitly manage reputation risk is clear. What is less clear is why. It seems to be a mixture of misunderstanding and myopia.

The misunderstanding comes from people putting this into the “too difficult” box. Although 10% of those surveyed say they already put a monetised value on their reputation, many other say the difficulty in quantifying the value at risk is one of the biggest challenges. Many of the risk managers surveyed say that better governance of reputation risk is required, including contingency planning, but overall responsibility for managing the corporate reputation is often unclear. One department manages brand communications, another corporate social responsibility, and another investor relations – all separately assessing and managing risks to the reputation.

The myopia comes from the senior executives. None of the Chief Executives or Chairmen in the survey thought that they had a governance issue. They all described reputation as an operational risk, and thought that a focus on good operational delivery was essentially all that is required – seemingly without thought to preparing for unexpected or external factors such as those that have recently affected the reputations of Cadbury and BP.

I am sure that it is not so simple, but what is clear, is that shareholder value is at risk.

BBC - Brand Blows Commercial

2006-05-31T11:21:00.000+01:00

The BBC, one of Britian's best loved brands, may be about to move away from its secure core values into the maelstrom of the international media brands. Mark Thompson, the Director General has declared his ambition: “The BBC is the only European brand that could take on Google and AOL.”

The desire of the DG to build the institution of the BBC is understandable, and he clearly recognises that the BBC brand is its major asset. The paradox is that building the institution into a leading global media player in a commercial sense may damage the very brand that they want to build on.

It has also been announced that BBC's commercial arm is going to launch an advetising funed web-site, BBC.com. If this is successful, the 163m people who currently tune in to the BBC world service each week, and countless others who value the television, radio and internet services, may come to see the BBC in a new way, as another international commercial media/communication brand alongside Google, AOL, MSN, BT, Vodafone, Yahoo, Disney et al.

What the BBC has stood for, in the minds of many of its audiences, has been impartiality. This has given it its authority. Now that it buys much of its creative content in a competitive market, it cannot really claim that its uniqueness can come from its productions. So its impartiality, based on its public srvice remit, is its critical differentiator.

Once it become seen by its audiences as another commercially-minded, partly advertising-funded media conglomerate, the brand will have little more claim to impartiality than News Corporation.

It may be Britain's best hope of creating another huge international multi-media conglomerate, but is that what the public want and need? Success for this strategy might ultimately reduce the burden of the licence fee, but the loss of brand value that will be spent to build this new BBC may be a greater loss to the Corporation and the British people?

The future is four-play?

2006-05-31T10:32:00.000+01:00

Convergence has been the buzz word of the communcations industry for some time, with industry pundits talking a barely intelligible jargon of 'triple play' and 'Quadruple play' (or 4-play). Now Vodafone, described by the FT as "the world's largest mobile phone company", has publically announced its new strategy, Mobile Plus, taking it towards direct competition with the giant internet and IT brands, AOL et al.

The move is perhaps inevitable, driven by Vodafone's failure to make substantial money from its old strategy of buying up other mobile phone businesses to plant the red Vodafone flag across the world (though the biggest overseas Vodafone investment, in Verizon Wireless, isn't branded Vodafone anyway!). Having had to write off billions of pounds of shareholders money from its acquisitions, a new direction was needed. Vodafone also faces a forecast decline in mobile phone spend with the expected growth of "free" internet based calls from Skype and similar brands (VoIP for those in the trade).

Vodafone's Mobile Plus strategy is interesting - perhaps the next step in a major strategic shift from being a "mobile phone company" to becoming a "personal communications company", once Vodafone adds video, games and other high value services onto whatever broadband access offering they develop, and provided Vodafone can cost effectively get access to content that consumers want to pay for.

From a consumer perspective of course, no-one wants "quadruple play". What people want is easier and cheaper ways to realise their communcation desires - which can be more easily described as talking, writing, reading, listening, watching, learning, sharing and playing.

Currently the Vodafone brand is a credible provider for talking (over the mobile phone) and writing (SMS texts). Success for the new strategy could require Vodafone to become the prefered, most trusted provider brand for reading and learning over Google and Microsoft/MSN; listening and watching over BBC and Disney; sharing and playing over MySpace, Playstation, Nintendo and PartyGaming. Otherwise it becomes relegated to becoming another anonymous infrastructure provider in a regulated and competitive market.

The opportunity for Vodafone to access a larger consumer market, and thus potentially a higher share of wallet is substantial. The big questions are surely (a) whether Vodafone can execute and offer these services better, faster/earlier or cheaper than the other regional and global players targeting these markets, and (b)inasumuch as consumers perceive choice between these convergent offerings, why they would choose the Vodafone brand for a set of services that Vodafone is not currently famous for?

Tying down the Virgins

2006-04-09T21:05:00.000+01:00

Richard Branson’s Virgin brand has proved much more flexible and promiscuous than most real life virgins - certainly any that I am concious of meeting. Getting in and out of bed with various partners, going public and then acting private again has been par for the course for the virgin with the capital V.

But now it takes another twist: the NTL acquisition of Virgin Mobile for €1.4bn is an interesting turn – an arranged marriage with massive alimony. Of this the shareholders of NTL are paying over €300m for the use of the Virgin brand in the telecommunications field over decades to come. One hopes that for this amount of money they will get enormous pleasure from their Virgin bride.

However, as NTL and their advisers are only too conscious, we live in a convergent world. Indeed this must be a significant part of the logic for their acquisition. Who knows in 20 or 30 years time how we will be defining the communications category? Music and television could be part of one entertainment market. The internet and air travel could be parts of one virtual and physical communications category. So NTL does not control the Virgin brand in all of its potentially conflicting manifestations today. Charles Trevail, quoted in today’s FT says that “the question is whether people owning the brand have the ability to reinvent it”. The bigger issue may be that as Sir Richard monetises his assets, several different sets of people are given the ability to reinvent the brand differently.

Inconsistency is the arch-enemy of strong brands. Virgin may be present in several different categories, but by and large the consumer has a singular concept of what values the Virgin brand stands for: the consumers friend , the iconoclastic challenger – characteristics very much in the style of their concept of Richard Branson. When different people are trying to reinvent the Virgin brand in increasingly overlapping categories, the Virgins will be running amok in different disguises. Who now can control and coordinate them? And when we don’t so easily recognise them, will we trust them as much? And if the brand ceases to command as much consumer trust, is it as valuable?

Richard Branson has done a fabulous job building and rebuilding the Virgin brand over decades, but this could well be the beginning of the end. The NTL/Virgin liaison is only just beginning, but one has to speculate that the so-called Virgin might already be half-pregnant.

Unwasted Creative

2006-04-07T21:08:00.000+01:00

A rare thing on a Friday night, but here I am, 11pm on a Friday night in Tallinn, batchelor party city supreme, just finished a long day of business, sober as a jesuit lying alone in my hotel with a warm laptop. Very sad.

Another rare thing is that somebody just published one of my pieces, "Wasted Creative" on their website. So you can't read it here, but can find it at

www.creativematch.co.uk/viewnews/?92192

if the link works. The argument is that much excellent creative work is essentially wasted because we get some great adverts that don't have any clear links to the products that they are supposed to promote. They might win nice creative awards, but don't necessarily win much business for the client. For example, the Honda "power of dreams" adverts are very wonderful, but I think that anyone who actually dreams of diesel engines or lawnmowers is also very sad.
What do you think?

Brand Risk

2006-03-17T10:08:00.000Z

Brand can compose up to 70% of a company's market capital value, but the reputational risks that can impact the brand - and consequently have serious detrimental effect on the shareholders are rarely analysed with the same rigour as more easily quantified but potentially less perilous.

Why is this?

Gluing in the Alien Jellyfish

2006-03-09T15:35:00.000Z

No, this is not some intergalactic sex-change technique, but an observation on the latest customer attraction and retention techniques from 3, a UK mobile network. They are famous for having adverts featuring Japanese cowboys and alien jellyfish; whilst incomprehensible to many, 3 is the fastest growing mobile operator in the UK.

I was interested to see two developments from them. Firstly, and most obviously to their potential customer base, they have a new "WePay" offer that they are advertising - paying customers to receive calls and receive SMS texts. Sharing the charges they receive from other operators for completing calls to subsidise new pay-as-you-go customers is a different way to attract new customers - and the benefits are in call credits, not cash, so they shouldn't suffer in the way that apparently happened in Roumania. There unscruplulous people allegedly advertisied cars and flat-lets at too good to be true prices and gave their mobile numbers...

The other, less well reported account was that they are starting gluing the SIM cards into the phones which they, like other operators, subsidise to attract new customers. This will mean that customers cannot so easily just add an new SIM card from another operator to take advantage of new offers. Not as obvious as gluing diners to seats in a restaurant, and restaurant diners don't usually take the chairs with them to the next restaurant!

3 were also the first UK mobile operator to sell advertising across their network, and have reportedly a strategy of becoming seen as a media business, rather than a telecoms comapny, so we can expect more innovations from them in the future. Paying people to watch adverts on their phones, and charging the advertisers? Competitions for the most popular mobile videos?

Brand Power

2006-03-03T14:54:00.000Z

I was recently asked how important is Brand Power today, and does it really exist in the age of almost infinite access to information, open communications, with instant price comparisons and direct consumer access to a broad range of alternative suppliers and distributors.

My belief is that brands are more important than ever, for three reasons:

Firstly, the compexity of the world means that few of us really understand the functional product features of a mobile phone or a computer or a car. How many people would recognise a 3G phone from a 2G phone, or a dual core processor from a single core processor just by looking at the inside of the device? So, we have to judge between competing product quality claims, working out which to trust by what we already believe about the brand. Brands that are highly trusted gain economic advantage and competitive power over those that are not.
Secondly, in the developed world at least, levels of affluence mean that most people can afford products that meet an adequate functional specification, so choice becomes more influenced by intangible image attributes. It is what the brand says about you to the set of people that you want to impress that drives preference in many categories.
Thirdly, many people are increasingly concerned about authenticity and provenance. The provider becomes as important as the product - so provider brands become as important as their product brands. These provider brands are under great scrutiny, so need to behave ethically and truly live up to their public claims. Toyota's leadership in hybrid engines and the Co-operative leadership in Fair-trade products probably has positive influence over people who do not necessarily drive a Prius or only buy fair trade coffee.

Aspirations to Mediocrity

2006-03-03T14:19:00.000Z

I rather like the current Ford Focus FT advert. It makes me smile. People, well sterotyped midde-aged men off to work in the guise of their boyhood dreams, leaving home as astronauts, JCB drivers or super-heroes. "What did you want to do when you grew up?" it asks. Which is very topical for me, having just had an embarrassingly big birthday. I have been remembering my childhood aspirations and wondering if I have time left to realise them.

But somehow, the question and the sponsor don't fit. I doubt that very many men dreamed of a Ford as the pinnacle of their ambitions. As a young boy we didn't have the money for a car, but I still didn't aspire to a Ford. A Bentley perhaps, or a Ferrari, a Jaguar, or even a Rover, but not a Ford. As I grew up we did have cars - a couple of second or third-hand Ford Z-cars: a Zephyr and a Zodiak. Big cars with bench seats that could hold all six of us and a few small friends. Very functional for a large family, but driving one of those was not what I dreamed of doing when I grew up. That would have just been aspiring to mediocrity, to a state that my father himself wanted to rise above. I am sure that many of us aspired to things that we haven't achieved, but to replace these dreams with a an bright orange Ford ST is to insult them.

For me, this advert fails in a way that I think much good creative British advertising fails. There are good, sometimes even great creative ideas, maybe even linked to truly original consumer insights, but not equally linked to an inner truth about the product. I loved the Guinness "swimmer" ad, but it didn't make me want to drink Guinness. Some of Honda's "Power of Dreams" adverts are inspired, but they don't make me think that a Honda Civic is more inspired than a Renault Clio.

Jeremy Clarkson commented that the Ford ST is the only car sharing its name with a feminine hygene product ( and maybe they will come out with an infectious Diesel version, the Ford STD), but if it is just targeted, as the adverts seem to be, at middle aged men that probably doesn't matter, as most won't notice. But the disconnect between the promise and the product is one for which they shouldn't be forgiven - by shareholders, if not by lost potential customers.

BMW - brand hurt by bad behaviour?

2006-02-07T10:26:00.000Z

The BMW brand has become less visible on the internet, as the web's leading search engine, Google, has accused BMW of trying to "manipulate search results" for its German websites and reduced its visibility through the seach engine.

So what? I hear you say. BMW is one of the best known brands in the world, and exceptionally well-known and well regarded in Germany. Brand awareness is hardly likely to drop as a result of people not finding a BMW site through an internet search. And few loyal BMW drivers who enjoy the driving experience are likely to change marques just because they can't find a BMW website.

It is possible that, at the margain, a few people who don't feel strongly about car brands might look at an Audi or Lexus or Mercedes site if they can't easily find the BMW site, and could finish up being charmed by a model they hadn't previously considered. But probably only a few.

More important is the dent to the corporate brand image of BMW. A business that is generally considered highly professional, and so very trustworthy, looks less trustworthy if it is implicitly accused of being manipulative. If BMW has violated the guideline: “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users” as reported in today's FT, then they might be thought guilty of deceipt. I personally doubt that any deceipt was intended - more likely just some inappropriate behaviour by over zealous web-marketers - but it is the element of doubt that has been put into people's minds that is the real hurt to the brand. If BMW's levels of trust and credibility has fallen amongst some segments - e.g. internet savvy news followers (who are often Opinion Leaders) - then this is a destruction of brand value, something that managers and shareholders should be concerned about.

Corporate Governance is a popular topic these days. Off-brand behaviours that damage trust and corporate reputations are failures of corporate governance. Perhaps more organisations need to ensure that tight brand discipline is a part of their governance just as much as ethics and the environment.

Google - brand turning point?

2006-01-27T11:28:00.000Z

Is Google Evil?
67% of FT.com readers inspired or insensed enough to respond to the readers poll felt that "Google is being evil". Not a necessary evil. Just plain evil.
This is an extraordinary depth of feeling for a brand recently voted by readers of BRANDCHANNEL as the #1 top global brand in terms of impact (www.brandchannel.com 23 January 2006).

Comments on the FT.Com Forum website explained why some people felt like this - they commented that "the internet is about freedom", and Google had "sold its soul", perhaps in the IPO. Clearly some of attributes and values that people had associated with the Google brand - freedom, openness, access - had seemed violated by the acceptance of Chinese censorship. People who had been fans or advocates of Google because of these values, and prefered to use Google because of them, now felt let down. They felt deceived. And those who had been advocates of Google in their private lives perhaps felt humiliated.

This is not likely to be the end of Google. It is not the turning point which is the beginning of the end. But is is probably the point of inflexion which is the end of the beginning.

Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, in his podcast from the World Economic Forum in DAVOS talks about setting up Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google. So Google is setting out its Corporate Social Responsibility platform, re-stating some of the ethical values that made it attractive in the first place. Perhaps replacing the ethical values of freedom with the ethical value of philanthropy. But this will not yet be distributing as much as Bill Gates Foundations, and those bilions have not put Microsoft in top place amongst "ethical" brands, despite donating more that many governments to importnat developmental and humanitarian causes.

The long-term damage to Google is probably not to its perceived goodness, but to the the sense of trust. If individuals in the internet community have a lowered sense of trust in Google, then the honeymoon is over. Their relationship with the Google brand will not be over, but will be less special. Google will have to to work out what its new brand values will be, and work extra hard to deliver them.