Branding Strategy Insider

Can You Reposition A Brand To Win?

Regular readers of Branding Strategy Insider know we welcome and answer marketing questions of all types. Today, Ely Portillo, a business reporter from the Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, North Carolina asks...

"Hi Derrick. I'm looking for some insight into why a retailer might change its branding. Lowe's (formerly "Let's Build Something Together" and now "Never Stop Improving"), has had several quarters of disappointing results, especially in comparison to its main adversary, Home Depot. What is the potential of a branding shift to help boost sagging sales and shift the terrain versus a larger rival?" 

Ely, the potential can be quite great if the new effort is better aligned with un-met customer needs than the competition. Often, when sophisticated marketers are faced with greater competitive pressure or a new economic landscape they turn to their customers for help in tightening the focus -- drawing on deep customer insight to create greater value. The power of brands lies in focus. Lowe’s new tagline very well could be a response to a better understanding of its target customers through brand research. 

"What else is generally required of a retailer to successfully carry through a re-branding campaign, besides a new tagline and ads?" 

How To Reposition Your Brand For Higher Meaning

To be successful at repositioning your brand, you have to create higher meaning and aim higher. Aiming higher requires outward thinking and learning from the marketplace.

Over the past two years, we have been engaged with a variety of consumer products brands whose managers are seeking new opportunities to grow their brand’s value. In all these engagements, I have noticed a common thread among all of them – consumers no longer care about them because they have lost their compelling meaning in the consumer’s mind. One thing is certain– once a consumer’s mind is made up about a brand, it’s next to impossible to change it. The decisions facing brand mangers and marketing executives regarding how they deal with our ever-evolving market landscape usually comes down to three options:

- continue to invest in the existing brand meaning

- create a sub-brand

- invent a completely new brand

All of these options have advantages and disadvantages, more so if the brand is also facing dramatic challenges in distribution. The driver underpinning all these options is change. Brands are dynamic. They have their cycles and they run their course. What’s hard for managers to grasp is when to move on.

This is particularly true if the brand was once a leader. Market success always creates size, power and a false sense of security. Over time, this creates an unrealistic view of the external reality, and a lack of urgency to correct course in maintaining relevancy among consumers.

Rebranding The Asian Carp

 
Think of it as “Extreme Makeover, Aquatic Edition.” Asian carp, scorned as inedible and hunted down as vanquishers of native species, are being taste-tested under new names on menus from south to north.

The background: Asian carp were imported to the southern U.S. in the 1970s to suck up scum from catfish ponds. But they’ve become monsters in the eyes of many as they have migrated North. They can grow to 100 pounds, multiply like guppies, and tend to leap crazily out of the water, bruising and breaking boaters’ bones. 

The fish got a lot of attention once they migrated up the Mississippi River and broke through an electric barrier designed to keep them out of Lake Michigan. 

State and federal governments have doled out millions of dollars to various agencies to eradicate them. But too little attention has been given to a rebranding solution: Eating the Asian carp out of existence, or at least making a dent in the population.

▪      It began in Louisiana, where wildlife officials rolled out a promotion dubbing the fish the Silverfin, and enlisting chefs to create recipes for the tasty white meat of the bighead carp and silver carp, two dominant invaders. “A cross between scallops and crabmeat,” declared one seafood chef.

Comcast Makes Classic Marketing Mistake

Comcast is in the process of rebranding some of its offerings to "Xfinity," although the company name will remain Comcast.

Consumers in 11 markets will have a choice of Xfinity TV, Xfinity Voice and Xfinity Internet. Presumably, Comcast will soon be rolling out these high-speed, high-definition services to other prospects in the 39 states the company serves.

Is this a good move?
Lawyers will tell you the best trademarks are "coined" names such as Kodak and Xerox. So we are seeing a raft of coined brand names you can't find in any dictionary, including Xfinity.

But wait a minute. There's a well-known automobile brand called "Infiniti." Isn't Comcast worried about the confusion between the two? If not, did Comcast consider using Xonda or Xundai or Xoyota?

But there is a bigger issue here. Comcast is a large company with revenues last year of $35.8 billion. In addition to its cable, telephone and internet services, Comcast has cable programming interests (G4, Versus and The Golf Channel) and also owns entertainment channel E!

Not to mention the company's 51% interest in NBC Universal, a joint venture with General Electric.

It makes sense for Comcast to have a pure "company" name like Procter & Gamble and have its services, programming and cable channels defined with their own brand names.

Internal vs. external
But what makes sense from an internal point of view often doesn't make sense from an external point of view.

Rebranding: Not Beyond Credibility

The bad news mounts for BP as the petrol giant has admitted that efforts to plug its Deepwater Horizon well and prevent any more crude oil escaping continue to fail.

One mile from the surface, and 50 miles from some of the most beautiful and valuable coastline on Earth, the leak continues unabated. And you can forget the estimates of how many gallons of oil are being pumped into the Gulf of Mexico each day, because BP has also conceded it has no clue exactly how much oil is leaking out.

These uncertainties add to the growing list of major imponderables facing the beleaguered British oil company. BP has said it does not know when the leak will be stopped, nor does it have any idea what the long-term ramifications for local communities and industries will be. It has also said it has no clue what the final cleanup bill will come to - except that it will be in the billions and that BP will be liable for every penny. Indeed, the implications are so inestimably huge at this stage that the only accurate bellwether of the kind of trouble BP now finds itself in has been the ashen, horrified look on chief executive Tony Hayward’s face. All the media training in the world cannot disguise the enormity of the problem now facing Hayward and his company.

Any oil company finding itself in this situation would be in trouble. But there is, of course, a very specific reason why BP, of all companies, is going to suffer more spectacularly than any other from this disaster. BP, as we now all know, now stands for “Beyond Petroleum”. In the most famous repositioning case of the century, Ogilvy and Landor helped BP to change its logo, its name and its positioning to reflect the fact that the company was now actively “exploring new ways to live without oil”.

A Rebranding Success from the Deep

First, a sincere apology for my last blog post. The OLOF spectacles that rendered all advertising invisible and Prail, the company behind the specs, were both anagrams and part of a really bad April Fool's prank. I promise no more joke’s for a long time. That's an important commitment, because today’s post might also seem a bit foolish at first sight, but I can assure you, this one is for real.

On Monday, UK grocer Sainsbury's rebranded a fish - the pollack, to be precise. It seems that despite pollack being much more plentiful, environmentally sound and cheaper than cod or haddock, the supermarket's research has revealed that the fish's unattractive name and reputation as only good enough for the cat have proven too big a perceptual barrier for consumers to overcome.

So this week Sainsbury's has started to promote pollack using the French name for the fish which is - wait for it - colin. No, not Colin as in Firth; Colin as in Powell, which is how the French say it. Not content with the fancy new name, Sainsbury's also hired designer Wayne Hemingway to overhaul the line's packaging with a Jackson Pollock-inspired, multi-coloured theme. Last week, it was boring old pollack; this week, it is a post-modern-packaged, French-accented envirofish.

Usually, at this point, I would evoke the universal, one-word rule of all rebranding strategies: don't. Unless your organisation must change a brand name for legal reasons, stay well away from the dangerous, career-shredding world of rebranding. It looks good on the flip chart at the branding agency, but the post-launch reality is usually a disaster. Customers and employees hate the new name, the company's leader-ship cringe when asked to support it, and the media rips apart the strategy and those idiot marketers behind it.

Identity Before Strategy: Doom for Rebrands

Rebranding efforts are tricky things. Once in a very blue moon they can prove to be the turnaround that the management team was hoping for.

Sports brand Puma, luxury brand Gucci and the gurus at Apple all provide notable examples of great brand revitalizations during the 90’s.

The strategic lessons from these turnarounds do not emanate from what these brands did, but rather what they did not do.

First, they did not change their names or logos.
Second, they did not announce that they were about to save, reposition or do anything particularly radical to their brand.
Third, they were patient; each brand took a decade or more to turn around.
Fourth, they did it in-house without depending on identity consultants to assist them.
Fifth, they did not recruit senior thinkers from established consumer marketing companies to replicate branding strategies from fast moving consumer goods (FMCG); they did it their own, brand-specific, way.
Sixth, any changes in ad strategies and spend came years after the initial turnaround had begun.

A great brand strategy does not start with name changes, new logos, multi-million dollar ad campaigns or bold predictions from chief executives.

Successful Brand Repositioning

You follow the same steps and address the same brand design components when repositioning a brand as you do when first designing the brand. But, brand repositioning is more difficult than initially positioning a brand because you must first help the customer “unlearn” the current brand positioning (easier said than done). 

Three actions can aid your success in this process: (1) carefully crafted communication, (2) new products, packaging, etc. that emphasize the new positioning and (3) associations with other brands (co-branding, co-marketing, ingredient branding, strategic alliances, etc.) that reinforce the new brand positioning.

You should not rely upon an advertising agency, a brand consulting company, or your marketing department to craft your corporate or organizational brand’s design. This exercise is so critical to your organization’s success that your organization’s leadership team and its marketing/brand management leaders should develop it, preferably with the help and facilitation of an outside brand-positioning expert.

We have more to share on Repositioning here and Brand Positioning here.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Rebranding A National University

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Why not change the world?™

As Vice President of the Rensselaer Alumni Association (RAA) board and chairman of its national Alumni Admissions Committee I was a key participant in the endeavor to rebrand Rensselaer. Today I want to share the case study of that effort.

Great Accomplishments, “No Man’s Land” Marketing Position
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, was the first degree-granting technological university in the English-speaking world. Rensselaer was established "for the purpose of instructing persons, who may choose to apply themselves, in the application of science to the common purposes of life." Since Rensselaer’s founding, its alumni have impacted the world in many significant ways:

•    Inventing television
•    Creating the microprocessor
•    Managing the Apollo project that put the first man on the moon
•    Founding Texas Instruments and creating the first pocket calculator
•    Creating e-mail (including using the @ symbol)
•    Inventing baking powder
•    Inventing the Reach toothbrush
•    Building the Brooklyn Bridge
•    Building the Panama Canal
•    Inventing the Ferris Wheel

Yet, for all its accomplishments, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rensselaer was not well positioned (to prospective students) compared to its world-renowned rival, MIT, or even to schools such as Cal Tech, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon. Many state schools (Purdue, University of Illinois at Urbana, etc.) offered exceptionally strong technical programs at significantly lower costs than private universities such as Rensselaer.

Branding, Acquisition & Transition

It is critical for companies that grow through acquisition to provide the acquired companies with the following tools for brand transition.

If re-branding is a forgone conclusion:

•Acquiring brand positioning (essence, promise, personality, etc.) reviewed with acquired company management and marketing department
     oAcquired company management and marketing department must understand the brand strategy of the acquiring company
•A fairly exhaustive inventory of possible identity applications to be addressed (such as catalogs, brochures, white papers, vehicles, signage, stationery, websites, presentation (PowerPoint) formats, telephone scripts, product, packaging, shipping boxes, trade show booths, etc.)
     oWeb considerations are critical -- URL conventions, combined or separate websites, redirects, applying new identity skin to existing sites, etc.
•Detailed guidelines for new brand identity, preferably including templates for most common applications
•Brand transition plan outline including customer, sales force, distributor and other business partner communication, transition steps and expected timeline
     oFewer steps are usually better. One step, if possible, is the most advantageous
     oAlso outlining anticipated incremental changeover expenses and long-term cost savings, if any
     oRevised selling scripts and sales training are essential
     oTimelines for individual steps will be based upon cost, complexity and importance of change
•Extra seed funds to facilitate a successful re-branding campaign

If re-branding is not a forgone conclusion:

•Brand architecture decision tree/criteria
     oIncluding options for acquired brands (independent stand alone brand, sub-brand, endorsed brand, product name, absorption into another brand)
•Brand identity guidelines/standards
•Recommended research to inform branding decisions (awareness, positive associations and other equity elements for the acquired brand and the acquiring brand within the relevant product/service categories)
•Brand transition plan outline including customer, sales force, distributor and other business partner communication, transition steps and expected timeline
     oFewer steps are usually better, one step if possible
     oAlso outlining anticipated incremental changeover expenses and long-term cost savings, if any
     oRevised selling scripts and sales training are essential
•Extra seed funds to facilitate a successful re-branding campaign

In either situation (re-branding as a forgone conclusion or not), the marketing department of the acquiring company must meet with the marketing department of the acquired company to make sure that there is a good understanding of the strategy, to identify possible issues and to develop a practical, cost-effective transition plan.