This week provides two timely reminders that brands and branding have never been more important, especially in the media and telecoms world. Yet ironically, the last thing we need is more brands.
Next month NBCUniversal in the US rebrands G4 as Esquire Network. The significance of this is not that it’s a routine channel revamp with a new sexy name and/or identity. Instead, NBCUniversal have taken a brand that is already familiar to millions of us the world over. They are rebranding with an old brand, not a new one.
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch has announced that all News Corp entertainment interests will be brought under the umbrella of 21st Century Fox. It is a forward-facing move that uses branding to help add value to the business by simplifying the complex, and by focusing on the highest value part of the business – content.
Both these events are bold, strategic branding moves, but interestingly neither has resulted in a new brand. However, they are helping consumers and business partners choose them by employing familiar faces, attributes, personalities that most people already understand.
Compare this clear thinking and user-friendliness with the launch last year of Everything Everywhere (quickly changed to EE), the UK’s new and largest telecoms brand. Despite bringing together two of the most high-profile telecoms properties – Orange and T-Mobile – they’ve felt the need to launch a new brand, from scratch, because?
At this point it is worth reminding ourselves why we have brands at all. The quick answer is that they help companies to deliver their business strategies, and to make it easy for consumers to choose which product(s) are right for them.
EE’s unclear brands
It is also worth remembering that when you have multiple brands, they need to work clearly together. To the casual passer-by EE’s brand family has all the coherence and structure of a Sunday morning car boot sale.
So here are five reasons why you should have as few brands as you possibly can:
- Like high-end sports cars, brands are expensive things to run. All brands require investment, so it stands to reason that the more brands a company has, the smaller each brand’s share of the purse. I’ve worked in organisations where the budgets on some brands have been so small we could have spent it on a weekend away. It is interesting to see that Discovery’s latest incarnation of TLC in the UK draws on absolutely no heritage at all, and therefore no branding leverage, which much increase marketing costs.
- Most new brands shouldn’t be brands at all. If Walkers (or Lays) launch another unlikely flavour of crisps they don’t call it ‘Bob’s Crisps’, they very sensibly give it a ‘descriptor’ so that consumers understand exactly what to expect. Sky has always displayed a clear and unambiguous policy on this, the latest Sky Movies Disney being a clear case of a name that does exactly what it says on the tin. However, if I had a Euro for every channel whose name was more cryptic than The Times crossword clues I’d be more than wealthy.
- New brands must offer something different. This doesn’t simply mean new content. Their starting point is a fresh insight which leads to a different story, set of beliefs, values and feelings. Without this new way to look at the consumer or market, the brand is just a variation on an old theme, and as such is not new. MTV Networks needed a radically different mindset and ‘un-MTV’ approach to create Viva, which was why connections with the mother-brand were conspicuously absent.
- All brands are always deemed essential to the business. When the decision is taken to rationalise, every last brand is claimed to be performing a critical and unique role, and that shedding it would lead to instant strategic vulnerability and revenue loss. This is clearly nonsense, but it often means that brands’ worth and importance are overstated due to emotional bias.
- Customers can usually be migrated from one brand to another. For example, we lost the Marathon bar but we gained Snickers. This is particularly true for media brands where the purchase and consumption locations remain the same, and where there is ample time to promote changes on-air to audiences.
Spring is in the air. So in a twist to normal seasonal behaviour perhaps media and telecoms businesses should spend the traditional planting months working out what brands they can cull, and therefore enjoy the savings and growth potential which a smaller portfolio can provide.
