August 2007

The Summer 07 issue of ‘Insight’ The Alfred McAlpine Group Magazine features an editorial by Jackson Bird’s brand and design consultant Ian Jackson. The topic is ‘the importance of brand’.

The editorial is featured here:

The Importance of Brand

We are surrounded by brands. There is no escape. Brands are a fact of life.

But what is this phenomenon that intrudes into every corner of our lives, whether we like it or not?

We drive brands – think Mini, Ford and Mercedes. We wear brands – think Levi’s and Marks & Spencer. We travel with brands – BA and Ryanair. We eat brands –Cadburys and Heinz. We drink brands – Coca-Cola and Guinness. The list goes on.

Brands have emotional power. The brand names mentioned above will prompt strong and conflicting responses among consumers, including love, hate, enthusiasm and opprobrium. This is because brand owners are constantly seeking to emotionally bond their product or service to a target group of customers who will buy into their brand values. By its very nature a successful brand must strongly differentiate a product or service from its competitors, so it inevitably divides opinion. These different attitudes are an essential factor in any brand’s battle to maintain and build its share in its particular marketplace.

There is nothing new about brands: they have been around since Greek and Roman times when traders marked their wares with a symbol to denote a mark of quality and to establish a customer following. The industrial revolution in the 19th century, with mass production and transport development, saw the start of the modern definition of branding as manufacturers and services started to differentiate themselves from their competitors with identifiable brand names and symbols. Some of those brands still exist in updated form, others have fallen by the wayside as their product or service values failed to respond to changing times. Some that have survived are Cadburys [1824], Pimms [1823], Boots [1849] and Colgate [1806].

In the 21st century mass communication provides an ideal climate in which brands can proliferate. The visual aspect of the brand, such as the Mercedes three-pointed star or the Virgin name-style, is the logo – essentially a memorable visual image that represents the company’s values. But the logo is the tip of the brand iceberg. Below it is the way that the company, through producing excellent products and services and by acting responsibly, gives emotional meaning to its relationship with its customers. A good brand logo is not the result of a designer’s whim, but a reflection of what the company is and aspires to be based on careful analysis of its core attributes and values. And the logo will be hollow without the commitment of everyone in the organisation to uphold and endorse the brand values.

Some long-established brand logos have become generic in their industries. The word Hoover, for example, became synonymous with vacuum cleaner. Yet despite the strength of the Hoover brand, another vacuum cleaner brand, Dyson, stole significant market share on the back of inspired design and engineering and premium pricing. As this demonstrates, branding is a continuous battleground.

Some branding exercises are pilloried in the press as a waste of money. In cases where the focus of the rebranding is a new logo, with no explanation of what lies beneath it, the criticism may well be justified. But good branding is an essential tool to protect a company’s future and the jobs of its employees, and detractors often fail to understand that.

The débâcle over the British Airways tailfins a few years ago is an example of how things can go wrong. The airline replaced the Union Jack with a range of ethnic designs, an inspired design idea that was consistent with its aspiration to be inclusive and to bond with passengers around the world.

The change polarised opinion, something the airline could have managed, but then former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put the kibosh on it when she signalled her disapproval by draping her handkerchief over the tailfin of a model aircraft at the launch party, in full view of the TV cameras. This jingoistic response led to BA abandoning the project soon afterwards.

I was reminded of the BA saga recently when JCB Excavators used a Union Jack tailfin to good effect in enhancing their brand attributes. The British company had for years powered its excavators with American diesel engines. But it commissioned a British engineering consultancy Ricardo to design a new generation of diesel digger engines so it could build its own.

When the project was complete, JCB strapped two of the new digger engines together, slotted them into a specially designed car (with tailfin) and broke the world land speed record for a diesel-engined vehicle. In this situation the Union Jack tailfin created a positive association with the JCB brand, sending a powerful message to the company’s specialist customer audience of the benefit of technically-advanced, home-produced British power. The exercise resulted in some very proud JCB owners and drivers and considerably enhanced brand equity for JCB.

Branding has many facets, but none is more important than the contribution that every single employee, whatever their rank or role, makes towards upholding the brand attributes through the way they behave. So rally round the brand, give it air to communicate the real agreed values of your company, and don’t be distracted by people carrying large handkerchiefs. 

Ian Jackson is a brand and design consultant at Jackson Bird Design.