Can digital let us put more fun into branding?

In a fascinating article in Revolution, Sept 2008, Justin Billingsley, Orange’s UK brand director told Adam Woods that digital was going to ’steal considerable budget from above-the-line marketing’ – no surprises there. However what was interesting was his comment that it was going to be used to more ‘cool stuff’ (by which I understand he means exciting, innovative digital activities) but with a more relaxed view to ROI.

It’s a phenomenon I have also observed: a client who had perhaps a £4m TV budget, decides to take, say, 10% out to spend on digital can be more prepared to take a few more risks. The same psychology that underlies the Orange approach of ring-fencing a proportion of the budget for more experimental activities seems increasingly common. Of course the results will be measured, and will inform future strategies, but provided the actions are on-message for the brand they will allow more adventurous conceptual thinking… and a bit more fun in these depressing times.

Believeing in brands for the wrong reasons

Listening to the radio today, there was an interview with a Wall St employee who made a telling comment on the failing major financial institutions: “… we believe in them for all the wrong reasons.”

In other words the brand values of solidity, reliability, competence and probity, we assume are implicit in these brands purely because of their scale and longevity.  Sadly we see the same is often true of those who have stewardship of those brands.  They have a belief in their invulnerability even when they are flaunting the core brand values. There is an unwillingness to accept discontinuous change… an arrogance of the right of the brand to exist and prosper.

I believe this catharsis is valuable in that it will lead to a questioning of ‘unquestionable’ brands. And there will be much head shaking by those managing lesser brands in how those given stewardship of such amazing brands could have so mismanaged them.

When banks go bad…

Three big US financial brands Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG in troubled waters. It is almost painful to watch as we know the values those brands represented have been almost certainly fatally damaged. Credibility, probity, financial competence, reliability and solidity are not just core values… they are critcal success factors. Without them the brand cannot survive. Imagine, as a brand consultant receiving a phone call…”It’s Lehman Brothers; we have a bit of a problem. Perhaps you can help us…” Hmmmm, suggestions?

Bleeding Brands

How much does one set of brand values bleed across another? I’ve just replaced my car and on my candidate list was a Nissan.  Nissan is not a brand that is high on my radar and I have little intuitive understanding of the brand values. However, it is Japanese… and I associate values, particularly of reliability with Japanese cars.

Normally, when I am working with clients to establish and identify their brand values, we try to evaluate the importance of their nationality as a brand attribute. But we can also consider the country or nation as a brand in itself. Japan as a nation represents certain brand values and some of these are reflected in manufacturing output from that country. When a brand draws values from other brands, either nations, products or services, it is probably more appropriate to look at brand values as a kind of venn diagram with specific values overlaying rather than simply as attributes. Then we can start to appreciate the brand as a system which may well be affected by changes in the status of underlying contributory brands.

In more commercial examples we can think of how brands bleed over each other: the ‘Intel Inside’ attribute of computer manufacturers, brands carried by retail outlets and programmes bought by TV companies.