BRANDING IS JUST ABOUT THE LOGO AND ADVERTISING

A whole chain of experiences that shape perceptions and preferences creates brands.

Of all the myths this is perhaps the most enduring, and probably the most injurious to an appreciation of what a brand is and the different disciplines involved in creating it.

It is easy to understand how it has arisen. The logo and the traditional thirty-second advert on television or the big billboard on the side of the road are the most obvious and noticeable elements of any brand’s identity. They are also the ones that tend to be most talked about in the media, which likes to focus on the obvious parts of a brand as it makes it easier to discuss them with their viewers or readers. Branding is often associated with the dark arts of persuasion practised by advertising executives in league with graphic designers and PR professionals. The hugely entertaining and popular TV series Mad Men is only likely to have reinforced prejudices amongst its viewers that advertising and logos are what really create brands.

Of course logos are hugely important, as is advertising. But they are not all that comprises branding. Brand owners don’t help greater appreciation of what it takes to build a brand when they make a big splash every time they launch a new logo or change a logo or launch a new advertising campaign and describe what they are doing as creating or changing the brand.

The role of logos and adverts

First, though, we must acknowledge the fundamental importance that the logo plays in the building of any brand. The fundamental purpose of any brand is to differentiate itself so that it is protectable by law. This is for the benefit of its owner and its consumer. The brand name and its accompanying logo or logotype are therefore a fundamental building block of every brand. It is also the asset, the piece of intellectual property that is actually traded when one business sells its brand to another business.

Second, we must also acknowledge that in the past, and particularly in the era in which Mad Men is set – the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s – differentiation in brands came from an artificial projection of a personality or set of imagery and values onto a basically inert product. The traditional equation that was used to explain how brands ‘worked’ was

P + I = B

– that is, product plus image equals brand. That would work for any packaged consumer good. So: toothpaste (product) plus confidence (image) equals Colgate. The image was projected onto the product through packaging and advertising; ‘confidence’ was not an intrinsic product feature, although the product features (fluoride etc) and benefit (fresh breath) were responsible for underpinning or justifying the feeling of confidence.

Given also that the majority of our daily interactions with brands will be with some form of packaged good or advertising on billboards or in magazines or even on your Facebook page, the importance of distinctive and differentiated logos and distinctive and consistent advertising is clear. Moreover, 75 per cent of consumer purchase decisions are made at the point of sale, according to research conducted by The Henley Centre in 2001 and this has remained largely unchanged. The cues that drive us to purchase at the point of sale tend to be the visual ones – the look and feel of the packaging, a strapline or surrounding advertising promoting a particular image or benefit.

But advertising is also important to business-to-business companies. That’s why SAP and Accenture run high-profile campaigns in public places like airports. They know that their current and future customers will see them. It reassures people about their strength and capability. The assumption is that if you can afford a big outdoor brand campaign you must be pretty successful or at least have very deep pockets.

So yes, logos and advertising are vitally important in brand building.

But even if branding was simply built through the external or extrinsic expressions of the brand then advertising and logos alone are not enough.

There’s more than just a logo in a brand’s identity

There are far more elements to managing the brand identity than the logo and a campaign. And many of these elements are in themselves protectable by law as trademarks – assuming, of course, that the brand owners use these other elements consistently and have applied for them to be registered as trademarks. It remains a truth that you can only own legally what you apply to own and what you apply consistently.

Packaging, for example, can be a key legal differentiator as well as a distinctive part of your brand. The (US) Budweiser livery is relatively unchanged over decades of brand management, which the King of Beers (also trademarked) has enjoyed. The graphics, the typefaces, the colours are as recognizable today as they were fifty years ago.

The shape of the Coca-Cola bottle, which was uniquely designed for Coke, is itself the subject of trademark registration. This means that no other cola manufacturer or indeed any soft drink manufacturer can imitate the unique look of the Coca-Cola bottle. In fact the idea of having a very distinctive shape for the Coca-Cola bottle came about precisely because of a fear that the fizzy liquid itself could be easily repackaged and sold under a different name by unscrupulous distributors. Douglas Daft, the legendary and visionary CEO of Coca-Cola during its explosive growth in the early decades of the 20th century, realized that by creating and investing in a bottle which would be difficult for distributors to recreate and which would cost too much money to recreate even if they wanted to, he could protect the interests of both the Coca-Cola company and its consumers.

In Chapter 18 we refer to the battle between the retailers and brands. A key outcome of that battle is that the brand owners, such as Nestlé, invest more heavily in more distinctive packaging shapes, such as the shape of their coffee jars, which they could then protect as a trademark. This not only helps to distinguish the products on the shelves from their own-label competitors, but also suggests an added value or premium product. It crucially gave them a real legal weapon in the battle against what they saw as ‘copycatting’ by the retailers.

So packaging, and product packaging in particular, is also a key part of a brand’s ‘make-up’. So are the slogans with which we become familiar. For Coca-Cola ‘It’s The Real Thing’ was for years a famous slogan associated only with them. There are many more that you will have heard of: ‘Don’t leave home without it’. ‘It’s finger-lickin’ good’. ‘The world‘s favourite airline’. Some of these no longer exist; BA, for example, now uses ‘To fly. To serve.’ But they remain such important parts of their brands’ identities that no one would now consider using them for anything else.

Not only packaging but also the shapes of product design generally can be trademarked and become a part of the ownable elements of the brand. The shape of the Mini has been similar since it first rolled off the production line in the 1960s. Many cars share very similar engineering platforms and often very similar exterior design shapes. Sometimes only the brand’s badge on the grill at the front of the car or one or two other smaller features distinguish one car from another. However, the Mini is genuinely unique and its shape is so distinctive that it can’t be copied or even near-copied in any way. It is a legally recognized integral part of the Mini brand.

Colours can also be trademarked. The specific colour of Heinz baked beans packaging is a registered trademark. The citation of the trademark registration states that the mark ‘consists of the colour turquoise being the most dominant single colour applied to the visible exterior packaging of goods’. Heinz was able to prove that consumers regarded the turquoise colour as so distinctive to Heinz that they would be confused if a competitor selling the same or similar products also used the colour. This ‘distinctiveness acquired through use’ (the legal expression) enabled Heinz to register its colour as a trademark. The colour purple was so important to Cadbury that it had some success in 1995 in registering it in the UK as a trademark for its chocolate bars. Nestlé have subsequently contested that registration.

Even smells can be registered and protected in use for specific brands because they are part of the distinctive ‘make-up’ of that brand. The smell of ‘Plumeria blossom applied to the thread’ was registered as a trademark in the USA by Osewezy, a Californian company that made embroidery thread in 1990, though it has since lapsed. Verizon, the telecommunications firm, has trademarked a ‘flowery musk scent’ for its consumer stores. In 1996, the UK granted its first olfactory (smell) trademarks to Japan’s Sumitomo Rubber Co for ‘a floral fragrance or smell reminiscent of roses as applied to tyres’ and in the UK, the odour of beer for dart flights by Unicorn Products, a London-based maker of sports equipment. There is some dispute as to how secure such registrations are because of the difficulty of precisely capturing a distinctive smell in words (a trademark must be capable of graphic representation). However, it shows that companies are conscious that consumers use more senses than sight, touch and taste when choosing their brands.

Even music has become an essential part of the brand. Intel’s famous signature sound was widely credited as launching the concept of ‘sonic branding’, the idea that a distinctive sound can be protected by and used to create familiarity, memorability and preference with a specific brand. Jingles have been used for many years by brand owners to create a memorable and emotional connection with their target audience and to help bolster brand awareness. Many of us will still carry in our heads today, like an earworm, jingles we heard from our youth: ‘A Mars a day helps you work rest and play’, ‘Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, gum, gum’. The cigar brand Hamlet even successfully applied to have Bach’s Air on a G String protected exclusively for use in advertising its brand.

Gestures can also be registered as trademarks, though it is rare. Gene Simmons of the band Kiss recently applied to trademark a hand gesture. Compumark, the trademark research and protection business, reported that:

In 1996, the American professional wrestler Diamond Dallas created the ‘diamond cutter’ hand gesture – which involved joining the thumbs and index fingers on each hand to create a diamond shape – and later went on to successfully trademark it. When the rapper Jay Z adopted a similar gesture almost a decade ago, Diamond Dallas filed a lawsuit against him on the grounds of trademark infringement, and the case was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money.

Protecting these gestures at law is important in maintaining the integrity of the brand and ensuring that they constantly have a recognizable presence. Encouraging consumers to copy these gestures in everyday life is also a way of creating more publicity and recognition for your brand, for free. So all of these and more aspects of the brand identity and imagery and associated and extrinsic attributes are important to building the brand – not just the logo and the advertising.

Brands are built through a chain of experiences

However, all these elements of the management of a brand’s identity are but the tip of an iceberg. Of greater importance to consumers or customers is the experience that the brand promises. Failure to deliver and to develop that experience consistently and relevantly can destroy a brand. Kodak did not go out of business because its logo looked dated but because its products were no longer relevant. The same is true of Woolworths and of other retailers who have failed to adapt quickly enough to the changing behaviour of consumers, ensuring that their brand experience matches the promises they once made.

Brands today are built in very different ways than in the times of the Mad Men. Today they are built through the delivery of consistent, recognizable and often remarkable experiences across every touchpoint a customer or a consumer might have of the brand. These include the service style, the method of distribution and the sales and after-sales experience. All of these are integral now to the building of the brand. Largely that is because brands are no longer just consumer products (as we discuss in Chapter 18). If you think about the brands that we experience today, such as Amazon, Starbucks, Google, Facebook, YouTube or even Apple, they are not brands built in any way around a single traditional packaged item bought off a supermarket shelf. And although the logos of each of these brands remain essential and fundamental to them, the role of traditional advertising can vary widely and may not in fact be of any relevance at all.

You might not need advertising at all

Amazon grew its brand not through investment in traditional advertising but by investment in its customer experience. It invested heavily in inventory to ensure that when it started it had more books in stock than the biggest traditional bookseller. A traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ bookshop might be able to hold around 300,000 books in stock if it has sufficient premises. Jeff Bezos decided that he would hold a million books in stock. He was told at the time that he was crazy to do this because sourcing that number of books would probably cripple his business. He later said that the advice he had been given was both right – it nearly did cripple him – and wrong, because it was also the making of the business. When people realized that they could get any book they wanted on Amazon, the word-of-mouth effect was enormous. And because it was online, people were able instantly to send a link to the Amazon site to a friend rather than give them directions to a store on the street that they might happen to visit the next time they were in town. Bezos has continued to invest heavily in the customer experience, as they have better understood how we buy and what we like to buy. The site is ever more convenient, ever quicker for us to find and receive what we want. The ‘One Click’ offer was an essential part of that experience. In building the Amazon brand, the experience was becoming the marketing. It is only in recent years, almost twenty years after Amazon was established, that they began conventional advertising. It was simply not relevant enough to how the brand was built before then.

Starbucks is similar. It would be very hard for any of us to recall an advert for a Starbucks coffee shop. There are some adverts for products that Starbucks now sell in supermarket chains, such as its frappé brands. But as Starbucks was growing exponentially globally during the early years of the 21st century, it simply did not advertise. It spent less globally on marketing in traditional terms than Procter and Gamble spent on one product in one market in one year. This is because Howard Schultz understood that consumers’ expectations of brands were changing. We are now prepared to pay a premium not for a product benefit or an associated feel-good image, but for an experience that gives us genuine, psychological and practical value. He also understood, like Bezos, that if you get it right, the experience would also be the marketing. The Starbucks stores became not coffee shops but ‘third spaces’, a place between your home and your place of work where you could hang out, chill out, chat or even work in an environment that was friendly, warm and where you could get coffee. Although coffee was essential, Schultz knew that it was only part of the brand.

Again, think of Apple. If you were to ask anyone what they most associate with Apple, it is unlikely to be the advertising, even though they have produced some iconic adverts in the past, including the classic 1984 Super Bowl ad that transformed perceptions not only of Apple but also of personal computing. It is likely that people will say they associate things such as the iPhone, iMac, the distinctive design, the stores, even the minimalist and functional white packaging design, or perhaps iTunes.

It’s likely also that they will mention the Apple store and specifically mention the people who work for Apple. This is important because increasingly the people who represent them, especially the people in frontline service roles, are driving the perceptions of the brand. Many people’s perceptions of an airline, for example, will be driven by the way in which they are treated by the on-board air crew and people at check-in. It is why Southwest Airlines, the most consistently profitable and popular airline in aviation history, puts such an emphasis on recruiting the right kind of people, people whom it describes as having ‘a warrior’s spirit and a servant’s heart’. The importance of people in building brand perceptions cannot be overestimated.

Consistently, studies carried out in the UK and USA have revealed that when asked what made any consumer switch from one brand to another, around 66 per cent of the reasons given was the attitude of a person representing the brand or business. It doesn’t matter what you say about yourself in your advertising or project through your logo: if the person wearing your uniform or your badge treats the customers or consumers badly, that customer or consumer is likely to leave you for your competitor. They will also tell as many people about their experience as possible on social media. United Airways ran into trouble in recent years when they lost a passenger’s guitar. In fact they didn’t just lose it, they broke it. What annoyed its owner Dave Carroll most was not that the guitar was lost but his perception of incompetent and uncaring service that he received from the United staff who refused to reimburse him. It prompted him to make a short YouTube video called ‘United breaks guitars’, which went viral; to this date it has several million views. One commentator, Chris Ayres in The Times, even speculated on the cost to United of such bad PR: ‘Within four days of the song going online, the gathering thunderclouds of bad PR caused United Airlines’ stock price to suffer a mid-flight stall, and it plunged by 10 per cent, costing shareholders $180 million. Which, incidentally, would have bought Carroll more than 51,000 replacement guitars.’

Consistency is vital to maintain your brand

Let’s take another brand that exemplifies this changing nature of what makes a brand: a retailer, which also designs and makes products.

Ikea is one of the world’s best-known brands. Its blue warehouse stores are identical wherever you go in the world, from China to Canada. Established by Ingvar Kamprad with a purpose of creating ‘a better everyday life for as many people as possible’, Ikea now has almost 400 stores worldwide and is well on its way to its goal of achieving 500 stores by 2020 and €50 billion in revenue. The success of the Ikea brand lies in its over-performance in a few key moments in the end–to-end customer experience. These are moments which add value to customers and return value to the company. First and foremost are the products themselves: they are the manifestations of the Ikea purpose – affordable Swedish design. They are made in large quantities, which means they can achieve good prices from suppliers. And they are sold in huge quantities at lower prices. It’s Billy bookcase is a ubiquitous feature of homes throughout the world; one is reportedly sold every ten seconds. All its products are sold in the same manner in those identical hallmark stores. These do not change noticeably from year to year or from market to market. People visited these stores 915 million times in 2016 and each time they would have had a very similar experience They would have – as we do now – followed the route that Ikea decides: you cannot go off-piste in an Ikea store. The high point is the display of the furniture itself. For many of us, Ikea furniture never looks better than when it is in the store. The stores are often out-of-town sites, so they can take some time to get around and people like to browse in them. So Ikea offers restaurants and family areas. The restaurants serve its famous meatballs, which Ikea also sells in pre-packaged formats in a little food shopping area near the sales counters. Ikea give particular attention to what happens by those counters. It realized that the most stressful part of the journey is often the queuing to pay. So, just beyond the counters, there are small hotdog and ice cream stands, both selling an inexpensive treat which means your last memory, especially if you have children with you, is a nice ice cream rather than the long wait at the checkout.

Ikea’s website and catalogue are crucial to its marketing. There were 2.1 billion visits to its website in 2016. And the catalogue is another hallmark of the Ikea brand. More Ikea catalogues were distributed in the world in 2012 than Bibles. Ikea is so conscious of the importance of its catalogue that it has now developed technology that enhances it. You can now get your catalogue online, download it via an app onto your mobile phone and by tapping on the picture of a particular piece of furniture you want and pointing the camera on your phone towards the part of your house where you would like that furniture to fit, it will project the piece of furniture into the room so you can see exactly what is going to look like before you get to the store and buy it.

Ikea is also aware of the importance that its people have in building the brand and makes every effort to ensure that the employees are treated fairly. As Fast Company reported, ‘in 2014 Ikea’s USA arm used the MIT living wage calculator to determine the hourly rate for its store staff rather than local rates as a result of which 33 of the 40 stores increased wages and 50% of its workforce received a pay bump in 2015’. Happy employees mean happier customers, is Ikea’s philosophy. And happy customers become brand advocates as well as repeat custom.

A whole chain of experiences that shape perceptions and preferences therefore creates brands. The logo is always fundamental, advertising is often crucially important but as we have seen in the case of Starbucks, Amazon, Ikea and, as we shall see in Chapter 20, Primark, it is not the essential brand builder. Jeff Bezos famously said a brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room. And what they say about you tends to be the result of what you say and do. In the book Don’t Mess with the Logo, a brand is defined ‘as everything you say and everything you do’. For the modern brand builder in a multichannel world in which people are craving authentic and engaging experiences not just entertaining advertising, remembering to build your brand on everything you say and everything you do is vital.

Further reading

Jon Edge and Andy Milligan, Don’t Mess with the Logo, FT Prentice Hall, 2009