BRAND HERITAGE
“What works best is for agencies and clients to work together towards a common goal, remembering that, ultimately, it’s the brand that is the king.”
With all this to consider, a pre- emptive strike is a weapon that the Brand Manager can and should use to stay one step ahead of the competition. You may be starting to think I’m sounding a little anti-agency, but far from it. I’m being realistic. Having worked for clients and now owning my own creative agency, I can see both sides of the discussion.
What works best is for agencies and clients to work together towards a common goal, remembering that, ultimately, it’s the brand that is the king, not a short-sighted promotion or billing goal. It can take decades to build up valuable brand equity, and it’s all too easy to abandon it in the pursuit of something shiny and new. David Cameron is the unlikely source of recent evidence of the value of sticking with your branding through thick and thin. This is through his now-famous comment on the coalition government that “It’s a Ronseal deal. It does what it says on the tin”. For a brand with heritage, great revenues and a tight margin, this would have been a great moment, but one that wouldn’t exist with an annual change in strategy or message! Lest we forget, Mars revived its
famous “Work, rest and play” slogan in 2008 after an absence of 13 years. In the post 2008 version, the original “A Mars a day helps you work rest and play” was cut to “Work rest play”, which, I would argue, is a more modern approach, but one that also retains the familiar heritage and the initial values of the brand. The strapline is still relevant to today’s consumer and is well known, so why on earth reinvent the wheel? Lord knows plenty have tried, squandering years of good work and brand value, let alone shareholder value, at the same time. Anyone remember the British Airways tail-fin branding debacle? Or other calamities, such as the Post Office’s attempt to rebrand itself as Consignia, which proved such a failure that millions more had to be spent to get it back to the brand we knew and understood. Time will tell if the Yellow Pages’ switch to Hibu will actually work. It has been reported that the company paid ‘top’ consultants to come up with approaching 60 different names. Indeed, the Chief Executive said that the new name was needed because the company was viewed as “a dinosaur” and also that “Hibu
didn’t really mean anything!” As I said, time will tell but I know what my money’s on.
Most recently here at White, we’ve been working on some top brands with great heritage – relationships with consumers that have taken years to build including names such as Calpol and Sanatogen. For the Republic of Ireland we carefully looked at the values and trust of the Calpol brand, and the place it had in parents’ hearts, before even attempting to update and refresh the packaging design. We absolutely decided against change for change’s sake – even though we could have billed more – because, fundamentally, it just wasn’t right for the brand. Latterly, for key vitamins brand Sanatogen we took the same approach, which was totally endorsed by consumer research and have now created a modern, vibrant pack for today’s market. Yet it still retains the value and heritage that has been built up over time. I like to think this approach sets us apart. It is light on shrill bells and whistles. My children are yet to don the boater hats of an Eton scholar. And I have never, ever advised someone to rename their company Hibu. I take some satisfaction from that
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