Invisible Brand

cchm:ping Joint Managing Director Rupert Pybus takes a world-weary view of the idea that massive service brands can be re-engineered at the flick of a campaign switch.

"Blimey, who last cut your hair?" No hair dressers have ever praised their predecessors. And neither, I suspect, has anyone responsible for brand development in any major high street financial services provider.

There's a rebranding conference presentation which I've seen at least a dozen times. In it, a head of brand or marketing or whatever piles criticism on the half-hearted efforts of those who went before them, going on to explain how this time, for the first time, the job's been done pr operly, not just with a spiffy new advertising campaign but also - crucially - with an extensive and indeed expensive series of staff roadshows, which have been received with torr ents of applause and wild cries of enthusiasm and which, for the first time ever, have genuinely enabled and empowered staff to figure out for themselves how they should start to behave in order to start giving customers the desired brand experience.

Within three years, of course, the person giving this presentation has moved on and been replaced by someone else, who now makes a conference presentation that piles criticism on the half-hearted efforts of those who went before them, going on to explain how this time, for the first time, the job's been done properly, etc etc etc.

It' s easy to mock. In fact, sometimes it's quite hard not to. (In an unkind sort of way, the funniest conference presentations are the ones by newcomers to the financial services sector who simply have no idea how many times we've heard it all before. A couple of years ago, during his brief and unhappy time at Abbey, it was Angus Porter. This year, it's Jim Hytnerat Barclays.)

DOOMED INITIATIVES
But the fact of the matter is that in trying to turn around the culture of several thousand branches and many tens of thousands of staff with a roadshow and a leave-behind DVD, these people are pretty much literally trying to stop an elephant with a peashooter, or to turna supertanker on a sixpence. OK, not literally . But each initiative is doomed to almost total failure. And as a result, each incoming head of brand or marketing or whatever will always start his or her conference presentation by piling criticism on the half-hearted efforts of the past.

The fact of the matter is that there is nothing in the history of brands and branding to suggest that brand ideas can be backfitted effectively into large, decentralised businesses where, until a week last Thursday, no-one had a clue that these ideas were supposed to be informing every aspect of their behaviour.

It's perfectly true that over time, some organisations have become very large indeed while somehow being able to take their key brand ideas from their earliest days along with them. American organisations seem particularly good at this: a variety, from Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to PricewaterhouseCoopers to Holiday Inn, Disney and WalMart, seem to demonstrate that even the two greatest threats to brand DNA - endless mergers and acquisitions, and the attainment of enormous size don't make an awful lot of difference.

In the UK, the internal brand alignment success stories generally involve younger, smaller, simpler organisations - First Direct, Egg, Body Shop, Pret. But in any case, the key point is that the businesses grew up with their brand identities on board from the outset. That's easily done. The question is what you do when either there wasn't much there to begin with, or you're determined to stop being what you are and become something else instead.

HEADING FOR THE ROCKS
The backfitting approach sounds so obviously implausible and ineffectual that you can't help wondering how any sensible person could possibly believe anything so stupid.

I think there are two underlying causes. First, it is true that with immense effort, and with great consistency of message over time, and with inspired leadership, and with passionate and compelling communications, and perhaps most of all with root and branch reform of a business's processes - especially in the areas of appraisal and remuneration - change is possible. From this, it is possible, if you're very silly, to conclude that change is easy and requires only a roadshow and a leave-behind DVD.

Second - and, I suspect, more perniciously - this kind of click-of-the-fingers brand repositioning is possible, at least sometimes, in the world of fast-moving consumer goods, and again it's possible as a result to conclude - quite wrongly - that something similar can be done in big, complicated, people businesses. There are quite a few famous fmcg case histories - Lucozade going to bed one Thursday evening as a sick-room drink and waking up on Friday morning as the energy drink of the country's leading sports stars; Heineken leaving the public bar as a cheap low-alcohol session lager and re-entering the saloon as a premium 5% proof Dutch import; Skoda metamorphosing from Eastern European joke to VW's value brand. Heaven knows that some of these changes have taken a lot more than a click of the fingers to pull off, for example when it has been necessary to replace an entire family of obsolete and desperate automotive flotsam and jetsam with a modern range of appealing and drivable cars. But even so, reinventing what it is that, say, Barclays is supposed to stand for and then creating a situation in which all the people in all 3,000 branches stand for whatever it is all the time is about 10,000 times more difficult still.

And of course even that is only the half of it. Barclays is a global business with branches in dozens of countries round the world. And it is also a group of businesses, which includes some very heavy duty corporate and investment banking, one of the world's leading asset management businesses and much more besides. Are we seriously supposed to believe that the newly-discovered values which are to inform the behaviour of the UK branches from next Thursday are to have the same effect on the branches in Malta and Nigeria, the bond dealers in Canary Wharf and the derivatives strategists developing new quant funds in Barclays Global Investors?

It sounds like nonsense, and of course it is. But nevertheless, every year, a new crop of Heads Of turn up on the conference circuit explaining how, this time, a wildly popular series of staff workshops all round the country has made all the difference and this time the staff really are empowered, enthused and enabled to live the brand.

Lost at sea
Do I think that engineering any real and consistent difference into the customer experience of a Barclays or an HSBC is quite simply an impossibility? If I'm honest, I do. Technically it may be possible. But it would be so hard, and so expensive, and would demand so much sustained effort on the part of so many people, that I just can't imagine any organisation really making the necessary effort.

Meanwhile, the self-congratulatory sequence of conference presentation flows relentlessly on, never for a moment allowing the facts to get in the way of what sounds - at least to the less experienced ear - like a very good story.