Five good reasons to rebrand

There is probably only one really good reason to rebrand and that is for a powerful strategic motive. If the values of the business, product or service are no longer aligned with its visual representation, then it’s time to rebrand.

Here are five opportunities to refresh your logo and visual branding and steel a march on your competitors:

The competition is moving in on your markets
Competition really focuses the minds of business owners and marketing professionals. And it happened recently to a new client who had a monopoly with his food product. A competitor launched a similar product. Until that point he’d invested little in branding and packaging, but suddenly he needed to knock out the competition quickly and restore his confidence. Within six months of rebranding the company and product packaging, he’d achieved these objectives and planned to invest in a new factory to cope with increased demand and maintain product quality.

You are launching a new product
You’ve got a great new story to tell, and you need to raise awareness and keep ahead of the competition. A powerful brand identity will make the product or service stand out from the competition and begin the process of building reputation.

Out-of-date look that doesn’t reflect customers’ aspirations
The world seems to move faster and faster with new products being launched all the time. You’ve only got to look at the automobile market to see the huge advances in engineering and manufacturing that have happened over the last 20 to 30 years . Design and branding now sets one manufacturer apart from the other.

If your visual image looks tired and out of date, then that’s how your customers will see you and they’ll move to the competitor that seems more in tune with their aspirations. Because ultimately we all need to belong and we express that sense of belonging in the brands we buy.


Positioning the business ready for sale or franchising
It’s an obvious statement but ‘brands have value’ to a business. A well-known brand is worth more than one that nobody’s seen. Successful brands tend to make more sales and are more profitable. A business with a great brand can charge more for an identical product or service, because it has a higher reputation.

For business owners planning for the future, building a brand makes good financial sense. They will be able to sell the business for more when they want to retire or capitalize on their investment. Building a brand is really what franchising is all about, a proven business with a strong visual presence, a reputation and guaranteed promise for the customer.

Getting ready for growth
Be ready for the upturn, however distant it may seem. There’s a great marketing story about Sanderson who continued to advertise their wallpapers during the Second World War, even though it was impossible to buy them. But when the war finished and houses were built and homes needed decorating, Sanderson was the brand people bought because they were familiar with it. This foresight led to them becoming market leaders for a number of decades.

And one other great reason to invest in branding and marketing in the downturn – it’s cheaper!


For more information contact:

Richard Tomlin
020 8943 1915
richardt@thefusioneffect.co.uk
www.thefusioneffect.co.uk

Are there are only two typefaces?

It’s funny how so many businesses miss a trick when building their brand and creating a visual identity that is distinctive, sets them apart from their competitors and reflects the personality of their business.

In my last blog I discussed ‘owning the colour in your business sector’. But look around at what the most successful businesses do and you’ll see that not only do they make great use of colour, but they combine it with an eye-catching typeface too.

And there are literally thousands of fonts. More often than not though it’s Arial – ‘the one with straight sides’ – and Times – ‘the one with curly bits at the ends’ – that get used over and over again. It’s a real missed opportunity, because at the end of the day the whole point of branding and marketing communications is to make it easier for the client or consumer to recognise and remember the brand, and an interesting typeface can help that process.

I was listening to Radio 4 a month or so back and an academic was discussing the results of some of his recent research which seemed to fly-in-the-face of conventional typography. He found that the information contained in text that was displayed in a quirky or unusual typeface was more likely to be remembered than text in a traditional font, because the eye had to work harder to read it. Sounds completely counter-intuitive to the conventional approach to typography, but what an interesting idea! Making the words harder to read could mean people have to put more effort in, and so, are more likely to absorb the content.

So, just say “no” to Arial and Times. There’s a world of typefaces out there waiting to make your brand and marketing memorable.

Own the colour in your business sector

Differentiating a business from its competitors is perhaps the key function of any marketeer or business owner. And colour can be a very effective tool in achieving this aim.

As a society we are ever more visually focused. Imagery is often more powerful and instantly recognised that the written word, which is one factor that has lead to the development of logos as key element in visual branding for consumer products and in recent years for service businesses.

For many brands and businesses colour is an important part of their identity, sometimes as important as the actual logo. Yellow was, and perhaps still is, the colour that defines the photographic sector, and Kodak ‘owned’ that colour. It was a important tool in building brand recognition. Orange did it brilliantly by owning the name and the colour in the mobile phone market.

In my local area in South West London, Dexters the estate agency ‘owns’ pink. Their For Sale boards are so eye-catching. When I drive down a road and see 3 or 4 of their signs it makes me think that they must be successful selling houses if so many people use them.

In the States UPS are making the most of their corporate colour, one of the blandest – brown – by emphasising the colour and featuring it in their strapline ‘The Brown One’ and are using it to re-orientate their business to being ‘Your Logistics Partner’.

Making colour a strategic part of building your brand and marketing is good business. Do you want to own the colour in your business sector?

For more information call Richard Tomlin on 020 8943 1915.

Great brands have great back-stories

It’s probably true that many of the best stories start with ‘Once upon a time’ and that these stories are the ones we remember the most. More often than not successful brands have great back-stories, where the entrepreneur created the business with an idea they were passionate about. What drives them is not the thought of being rich, but changing the world in a small way. That passion drives them against the odds and advice of others to achieve their ambitions.

The story behind Dyson is a wonderful example of this and it’s set out in Iain Carruthers’ book called How Dyson Changed the Meaning of Cleaning. I’d definitely recommend it. Dyson has used his back-story as a key element in positioning his brand, even through he’d never refer to Dyson as a brand – sounds perverse but true. There’s nothing like being the underdog, beating the big dogs at their own game and becoming a bigger and smarter dog than they could ever have imagined.

Here’s another:

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Katie who lived in Hampton, West London. As soon as she could walk she drove her parents to complete distraction, she was so full of energy – doing handstands, forward rolls, bouncing up and down on her bed as if it were a trampoline, leaping about on the sofa.

To save the furniture and give herself some respite her mother took Katie to Heathrow Gymnastics Club, where using another animal analogy – Katie took to gymnastics like a duck to water. There she learnt new moves, honed her skills and as she grew up became a very proficient gymnast – training long and hard, entering junior competitions and winning too. She became British champion and took part in the World Championships. By the time she’d retired at 21, Katie was five times British Aerobics Gymnastics Champion, an achievement perhaps never to be repeated.

After Katie retired from competition she started a business running after-school gymnastics clubs, passing on to children her passion for gymnastics and it’s ability to train and discipline young minds while they have fun. It’s called BackFlip Performers http://www.backflipperformers.com and is based in her two Katie Cannon studio gyms in Petersham and Brentford, and at five other venues in South West London.

It’s an inspiring back-story and gives Katie a wonderful platform on which to build a successful, branded business.

To find out how The Fusion Effect has helped Katie Cannon and the BackFlip Performers build her business and her brand, call Richard on 020 8943 1915.

We’ve all got an amazing story to tell: What’s yours?

Name me a business that doesn’t want a great reputation

I can’t think of a single business that wouldn’t want a great reputation. But I bet we can all think of many businesses that don’t have one. Some that did and then lost it and never got it back. Others that responded quickly to a disaster, sorted the problem and enhanced their reputation.

I recently heard this great story about a major UK airline that had a contract with a large pharmaceutical company for their travel. Their event manager traveled the world on their behalf and her requirements were very specific, as she was a wheelchair user. But one day for various reasons the flying times didn’t suit and she took a flight on another UK airline.

When she boarded she was very upset as they took away her priceless wheelchair, but they promised to take great care of it and bring it back to her when the flight landed. Her worst fears were realised when it came back in pieces, crushed and useless. The company eventually found a rickety one to get her through customs and to her car.

She arrived home tearful and angry and poured out her story to her husband. He said that someone from the airline had phoned a couple of times and would call back. A few minutes later the phone went again and the voice said “Hi I’m Richard Branson and I’d really like to apologies for the damage to your wheelchair. We will happily replace it, choose which ever model you want”.

To cut a long story short, they biked over a selection of catalogues and she chose the one she’d always wanted. It was one from the States where wheelchairs have no speed restrictions – she’s something of a speed freak having drag raced in her youth – and it was delivered two weeks later. She was delighted.

Her chairman caught up with her some weeks later having heard the story, and was so impressed that he said Virgin should have the opportunity to pitch for their business.

Now I find that pretty impressive. It demonstrates really well a culture where the customer is put first and the employees have a process where they can act quickly to put things right and get action at the highest level, with great attention to detail.

If you want your business to have that kind of reputation then there are probably four areas that as a business owner you should focus on to grow your reputation and start the process of building a brand:

The product or service
The product or service must be relevant and appropriate for the consumer, and better than the competition. It must live up to its promise, delivering exactly what “it says on the tin”. The company should be constantly innovating, enhancing the product to keep ahead of the competition.

The environment
This is the arena that the business operates in. If it’s a shop, it’s how it looks, if the products are well lit, the clothes neatly folded, for example; how the customer can move around it easily and find exactly what they want. If the business is in food preparation, factors will include cleanliness, food storage, and health and safety. If it’s in car hire it might include supplying good maps, or Tom Toms, and that the vehicles are always spotlessly clean inside and out.

Behaviour
In many ways this can be the most important factor for the majority of business owners. It’s how your staff interact with your customers – they are the ones in direct contact, often face to face with them. If your employee has an off-day, is rude, thoughtless or unhelpful, everything the business will have done to build its reputation and brand will be negated. As far as the customer is concerned the person in front of them, or on the telephone, is the brand. When things go wrong, and they always will at some point as we’ve seen above, it’s how the business responds, says sorry and puts the problem right quickly. Businesses are more likely to retain those customers and they are more likely to tell their friends if they’ve had a good experience, especially when things initially went wrong.

The communications
All really successful businesses use design to create relevant, consistent, coordinated and eye catching communications with all their stakeholders – customers, staff, suppliers, investors and shareholders. For example: an identity that reflects and re-enforces what the brand stands for. Sales literature that is clear and easy to read and meets the users’ aspirations. Websites where it’s easy to find and buy what customers are looking for. This is the area the The Fusion Effect specialises in: visual branding, design and marketing communications.

Building a brand and maintaining it is a continuous process. It’s an attitude that should run through the business like the name in a stick of rock. Any business that works on these four areas will over time create a great reputation – and a great brand – retain customers, and ultimately make the business sustainable and more profitable.

For more information, contact Richard Tomlin

In my next blog – Has your business got a great back story?

A logo is not a brand

We are confronted by brands virtually wherever we go, particularly on the High Street and online. Even countries and celebrities are now getting branded.

For the business owner there are a number of benefits in building a brand. A branded product can demand a premium over an unbranded product – profitability is higher; customers are more likely to seek out the branded product and it’s easier for it to be identified in a crowded market – lowering marketing costs. The value of the business itself is enhanced, the brand copyright or intellectual property adds value, increasing the share price if it’s a public company, or for the entrepreneur enabling them to demand a higher price for the business, when selling out prior to retirement, for example.

I often hear a business owner say “design me a brand” when what they actually want is a logo. But a logo is not a brand. A logo is the visual representation of the brand.

Brands can’t be created instantly, they take time, sometimes many years. They are really about communicating the values of the company, product or service and reflecting back the aspirations of the consumer. Brands allow us to realise our dreams. How we feel about them is an emotional response and it’s often difficult to explain why one brand fits the image we have of ourselves. As Rob Walker said in his book ‘I’m with the brand’: “Brands can play a role in the stories we tell about ourselves and help resolve the tensions between individuality and belonging”.

Multinational businesses such as Coca Cola, Toyota and BP have invested millions of £s and $s building their brands, the value of which has been reflected in their share prices. However in recent months Toyota has had problems with product safety, which has been extremely damaging to their brand; and for BP, the disaster in the Gulf has probably damaged them fatally, their share price has halved, their independence threatened and reputation trashed.

I often find when talking to small and medium sized business that it’s easier to understand the value of branding if the word is replaced with ‘reputation’. Suddenly businesses get it straight way – their reputation is their most valuable asset. If their customers ‘trust’ their product or service they will come back again and again. Conversely the loss of reputation can be hugely damaging.

In next month‘s blog I’ll look at the key issues of – Product, Environment, Behaviour and Communications – that every business needs to focus on if they want to build a brand – and enhance their reputation.