Branding, Advertising & Promotion
Here are some guidelines on branding, and for planning and managing advertising and promotion activities for small businesses. The principles transfer to very large businesses. In fact many very large organisations forget or ignore these basic rules, as you will see from the featured case-study example.
Branding
Branding refers to naming a business or product or service. A brand will typically also have a logo or design, or several, associated with it.
Facebook is a brand. So is Cadbury (a company brand, although now a division of a bigger one), and so is Milky Way (a Cadbury product brand). So is Google (so big a brand and a part of life it’s become a verb, ‘to google’). So is Manchester United (upon which a vast merchandise business has been built). And so increasingly is your local school, hospital, and council. Brands are everywhere.
If your name is John Smith and you start a landscape gardening business called John Smith Landscape Gardening, then John Smith Landscape Gardening is a brand too.
Branding is potentially a complex subject because it extends to intellectual property and copyright, trademarks, etc., for which, if you are embarking on any significant business activity, you should seek qualified legal advice. When doing so contain your ambitions and considerations (and your legal fee exposure) so that they are appropriate for your situation.
There is much though that you can decide for yourself, and certainly a lot you can do to protect and grow your brand so that it becomes a real asset to you, rather than just a name.
General guidance about business and product names, your rights to use them, and ways of protecting them, are provided (for the UK) via the UK Intellectual Property Office website. Many of these principles apply internationally, although you should check your local laws for regions beyond the UK and especially beyond Europe.
Aside from the legal technicalities certain basic points should be considered concerning branding:
- Brand names must be meaningful and memorable in a positive relevant sense. Ideally your customers should associate your brand(s) with your business, your quality, and perhaps some other aspects of your trading philosophy and style.
- Choose your brand names carefully. Product and business brand names carry meanings. Meanings can be different among different types of people. If possible test possible brand names with target customers to see what the market thinks, rather than relying only on your gut instinct on your friends’ opinions.
- If your business is serious, and certainly if it is international – you must seek advice about the international meaning of branding words and the rights and protections implications of those words.
- As a general rule, but not a consistent point of law, you are usually much safer in terms of avoiding risk of breaching someone else’s rights to a brand name if you use a generic (properly descriptive) word or phrase to brand your business or product, than if you use a made-up name, or any word which does not properly describe your business or product.
- For example – if you open a pet shop in Newtown and you call it (give it the brand name of) ‘Newtown Pet Shop’ then probably this will not breach any existing protected rights belonging to someone else in the pet business. If instead you want to call (brand) your pet shop ‘Petz’ or ‘Furry Friends’ then there is a strong likelihood that someone else might already have protected such a brand name, which could give problems for you in the future, especially if your business becomes big and successful, or you wish to sell it one day, or if the rights-owner happens to be particularly aggressive in protecting their rights.
- It takes many years to build trust and reputation in branded names (of businesses, services, and products) so making frequent changes to business names and brand names is not a good idea, and in some cases even making a single change can produce surprisingly powerful problems. See the case-study example of ineffective branding and organization name changing below.
- If you must change a brand name, and there are times when this is necessary, you should plan (unless there are strong reasons for ceasing the previous brand) a transition which customers and the wider market-place understand. An obvious solution is to phase the change by merging the old and new brand names. The UK Nationwide Building Society is a good example of this when it joined with the Anglia Building Society. For several years the new company was then branded the Nationwide Anglia, only dropping the Anglia when the market fully recognised the change. Commonly executives and agency folk managing a new brand name project tend to overlook the sensitivities of customers who know and trust the old brand, and this is especially risky to customer loyalty and business continuity wherever a brand with a strong reputation is replaced.
- Beware of creative agencies giving you advice that’s more in their interests than yours and your customers. Brands and advertising are primarily communications with customers, they are not works of art or the personal statement of a designer. The creative aspect of a brand (particularly design or logo) must be of good quality, but the creative element is not an end in itself. Often the best solution is the simplest one, because customers understand it. Always ask youself – “Will people understand this (brand or brand image/communication)? Will it be meaningful to my target audience, and does it truly fit with what I’m trying to do in my business?”
Branding & Name-change (case-study example) how not to do it.
For very many years the UK government department responsible for business was called the DTI – Department for Trade and Industry.
The DTI was formed in 1970. It was a merger of the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Technology.
The name DTI was effectively a brand. It was a government department, but in all other respects it was a massive branded organization, offering various services to businesses, and to regions and countries also.
The DTI had a logo, a website. It had staff, a massive target audience (of billions globally), customers (effectively, tens of millions), a huge marketing and advertising spend, including national TV campaigns, posters, informations brochures, and every other aspect of branding which normally operates in the corporate world.
The organization name ‘the DTI’, was an obvious and recognised abbreviation of ‘Trade’ and ‘Industry’, and this described very clearly what the department was responsible for.
Not surprisingly, the DTI name developed extremely strong brand recognition and reputation, accumulated over 27 years, surviving at least two short-lived attempted name changes during that period (each reverting to DTI due to user critical reaction) – until the name (brand) was finally killed off in 2007.
For more than a generation, millions and millions of people recognised the DTI name and knew it was the British government’s department for business. Many people also knew the website – if not exact the exact website address, they knew it was ‘www.dti….(something or other)’.
Simply, tens of millions of people in the UK, and also around the world recognised the DTI as Britain’s government department for business.
For people in business, this is a very substantial advantage for any organization to have. In a corporations, this sort of brand ‘equity’ is added into balance sheets, and can be valued at many £millions.
Then in 2007 the government finally forced through a name change, and the DTI was replaced, with, wait for it…
The Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform – BERR.
Twenty-seven years of brand equity and reputation gone, just like that.
BERR became instantly the most forgettable, least logical, and most stupid departmental brand in the entire history of government department naming and branding cock-ups.
No-one knew what it stood for, no-one could remember what it was called, and no-one could understand what it was supposed to be doing even when it was explained.
Even the term ‘business enterprise’ was a nonsense in itself. What is business if it’s not enterprise? What is enterprise if it’s not business?
And what is ‘regulatory reform’ in the context of business and enterprise? Hardly central to international trade. It was a bit like renaming Manchester United Football Club the Trafford Borough Playing Fields, Caterers and Toilets.
Not surprisingly BERR didn’t last long, and duly in 2009 the government changed the name again to BIS – (the department for) Business, Innovation and Skills. Let’s see how long this name lasts. I’ll give it a year or two at most.
It’s only taxpayers’ money, so the enormous costs and wastage caused by this recklessness and poorly executed strategy are not scrutinised like they would be in a big company.
You can perhaps begin to imagine the costs, losses and other fallout caused by changing such a well-established organizational name and presence, twice in two years.
The case-study does however provide a wonderful example of re-naming/re-branding gone wrong on a very grand scale.
Read More…
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Mahmoud Bahgat