Invisible Brand

Are brands still playing by the established rules? Lucian Camp thinks back to how the game was played at the start of his career, and concludes that over the years virtually everything he learned has been shown the red card.

There are all sorts of occupations – Member of Parliament, high court judge and football referee are three that come to mind – where it’s more or less impossible to admit that you were wrong. Once in a while, maybe, you can get away with it. But do it too often, and it won’t just be a few aggrieved fans chanting “you don’t know what you’re doing.”

How different jobs like these must be from the kinds of job I do, in financial services branding, marketing and communications. If I look back over the ten things about brands that I believed most strongly in the early days of my career as a financial services specialist, I reckon that not just one or two, or even six or seven, but actually all ten of them have turned out to be at least partly wrong – a record of erroneousness that’s unrivalled, I’d say, by even the most rubbish Premiership ref. (Mike Riley.)

Here, in no particular order, are the ten examples of what I suspect George Bush might have called “mis-thinking.”

1  “Everyone else is better at building brands than we are.” In financial services, we used to stagger around with family-sized packs of McCain chips on each shoulder. We knew nothing about building brands. People in fmcg knew everything.

Well, maybe it’s just that we’ve improved, but over the intervening period we’ve come up with masses – niche, specialised or b2b ones like First Direct, Egg, St. James’s Place, Just Retirement and Bright Grey, and big mainstream ones that weren’t around in my early days like HSBC, AXA and Direct Line. Can anyone think of a new brand in chips since McCain? Thought not.

2 “Building brands is a long-term game, like gardening.” I cut my teeth, or maybe rotted them, on Mars confectionery brands like Twix and Bounty. Mars thought that building a solid, durable brand meant hammering away with single-minded USP-based advertising for thirty years or more. They were wrong. As financial brands like many of those under the previous heading as well as countless non-financial brands like Google, Facebook and iPod have proved, if people don’t get it after thirty months then they’re never going to get it. Actually, sometimes, it seems like thirty days is enough – Susan Boyle, Brawn GP, Heston Blumenthal’s relaunched Little Chef.

3 “Brands are resistant to damage.” As it turns out, it depends on the damage more than the brand, and there have been plenty of examples of irresistible damage over the years. Arthur Andersen and Enron seemed about as resistant to damage as the Titanic was to icebergs. And I don’t suppose anyone is likely to relaunch Icesave, Lehman Brothers or Bear Sterns any time soon.

4 “As someone famous once said, ‘…a good brand makes a promise that is kept…’ ”
Actually, I’ve written about this at more length elsewhere in this issue. But all this “promises” stuff, if not completely wrong, is highly misleading. If a “promise” means an objective Mars-style USP, then forget it. Few of these mean anything much to consumers. If, on the other hand, it’s a “promise” to be true to an identity that I’m happy to engage with and relate to, then maybe this isn’t completely stupid.

5   “Strong brands are more trusted.”
Strong brands like RBS, Halifax, Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock, you mean? Actually, I’ve written about this at more length elsewhere in this issue too, but in case you don’t have time to search out the piece and read it, here’s the executive summary: no-one trusts anything much any more, least of all brands and even leastest of all financial brands.

6 “Whatever your business model, if you’re in a b2c business a strong brand is an
invaluable asset.” Well, tell that to the likes of Skandia, AEGON, Just Retirement, St. James’s Place and countless others, including my pension adviser’s favourite fund provider who is apparently called Dimensional, who’ve been hugely successful while remaining unknown to the public. As we should have known from other markets – tyres, wallpaper, central heating boilers – where intermediaries of one kind or another play a vital role in getting the product into consumers’ hands, a strong brand is a strategic option. But it certainly isn’t a necessity, and given that many financial providers with this option available are not well placed to take it – no very obvious brand assets, absence of brand-minded culture, anxieties about spending the money – it may well be that they should stick with an alternative approach.

7   “It’s never too late to start building a brand.” Not so. Much as people in agencies like mine hate to admit it, if you’ve built a large, diverse, multi-channel, multi-market, multi-site business that has achieved its current size and scale without the faintest trace of a distinctive culture, commitment to particular values or even consistency to an organising idea, I’m afraid it’s probably too late to start brand-building now. Just look at the way Norwich Union (now Aviva) and Barclays (now still Barclays) have floundered around looking for a brand idea over the last twenty years or so and never found anything that they can live with for more than two years at the most. You have to admire their patience and stamina in maintaining what by now surely everyone can see is a hopeless quest: there can’t be a better example of the triumph of hope over experience.

8  “Branding is mostly about advertising and packaging.” Ridiculous. How could we have been so stupid? In financial services, branding is entirely about the customer (or target group) experience. Advertising and packaging are small and relatively unimportant parts of this.

9  “Building a portfolio of specialised brands makes more sense than building a big vacuous master brand.” This is that Mars confectionery experience talking again – imagine trying to persuade them to drop Bounty, Twix and Snickers and just call them Mars Coconut, Mars Biscuit and Mars Peanut. I must say, letting go of this idea is really hard, because it really does go to the heart of what I’ve believed about brands for half my life. But much as it pains me to say it, if HSBC were the master-branders for the last 20 years while HBOS were the proponents of the portfolio, it does seem that judging by recent events it’s HSBC who’ve been right, and HBOS catastrophically wrong.

10 (And finally) “Our job, client and agency alike, is to try to manage and control our brands.” Not completely wrong yet, but in the Internet age getting wronger all the time. What we’ll gradually have to recognise (and as eBay, Facebook, Trip Advisor and even mainstream retailers like Amazon have recognised long since) is that when you invite consumers into your online business, they will have – indeed, insist on having – their own ideas about managing and controlling your brands. Increasingly, our job will be not so much to manage the brands, but to try to manage the customers who manage the brand. This sounds scary, but has the potential to be enormously much more fun.

That’s it. I reckon that of my ten original ideas about brands, I now recognise that seven were completely wrong, and three partly wrong. This, of course, makes me feel very clever. But also, of course, very relieved to think that 25 years from now, I certainly won’t still be writing articles in this publication to check out how what I now believe has stood up to the passage of time.