I have had the good fortune over the course of
my career to work at several organizations that underwent retooling of their
brands. For most companies, developing a brand is a long, arduous process that
involves multiple phases, a great deal of research, and even more time and
effort spent getting people to buy into the new brand once it is revealed. I
have seen branding campaigns managed in a very structured and thought-out way,
and I have seen other campaigns thrown together that ultimately resulted in a
mish-mash of the old and new brands.
My first experience with a rebranding project
took place at my alma mater while I was an undergraduate college student. The
university had a brand image that had been in place since the 1980s, and it had
resulted in a stagnating image of the university among potential and current
students. The university’s brand seemed to be an afterthought, and the students
perceived it that way. So, after university trustees made the decision to grow
enrollment, the university had to think differently about its brand and its
public appearance.
As a communication student, I had the
opportunity to sit in on a couple of focus group sessions held in our building
by the rebranding agency. They surveyed students all over campus as well as alumni.
The goal was to collect feedback and input to better understand the mission,
vision, goals, and values of the university and its students. It involved a
tremendous level of research, interviewing hundreds if not thousands of
students, and then codifying that data in a meaningful way. But, without that
research, how would they have been able to have a cohesive understanding of the
“DNA” of the university? Any rebranding effort would have failed miserably
without this critical layer of research.
Once that portion of the branding agency’s
efforts were complete, we students heard nothing more until the university’s
new logo and positioning statement were publicly announced. I remember
distinctly that there was intense backlash against the new logo when it came
out. The new logo was basically the university’s initials set in a red
Helvetica Neue typeface. (On a side note: This reveal of the new university
logo began my obsession with typography which continues to this day as a
communication practitioner and graduate student.) There were a number of
students and alumni who looked at all the new logo and the new slogan (“Where
You’re Going”) and asked: Is that all
there is?
The reality for this university was that
rebranding had little to do with creating an identity for the students who were
already there and more to do with creating an identity for those who had not
yet arrived. The new brand was for the young people who have no prior attachments
to the brand and serve as opinion leaders in their own high schools and
communities. The brand had already been identified in the minds of those who
were on campus, naturally creating a bias in their minds against a redesigned
brand. But that bias really didn’t factor into the strategic planning of a
university where almost all of those who were opposed to the new look would
likely be gone from campus in four years or less.
Have you ever thought that some people, or
even perhaps most people, struggle with accepting change? Just 3.4 percent of
smartphone sales went to Apple’s iPhone following its debut in the summer of
2007 (source).
By the fourth quarter of 2015, devices running iOS and Apple’s competitor,
Android, combined for more than a 98 percent share of the world’s smartphone
market (source).
This slowness to adopt has much to do with the ideas put forth in Everett
Rogers’ Diffusion of innovations theory (book).
Rogers suggested in 1962 that as a new idea is disseminated, society divides
itself into five groups that adopt the idea at varying rates of speed. Innovators, while making up a tiny
fraction of the population, are also the first to accept this new idea,
followed by a larger (but still a minority) segment known as early adopters who also tend to be
opinion leaders. The early majority
and late majority follow, concluding
with a small but sizeable population known as laggards. To get every segment of adopters on board takes time, but
it also takes a commitment to what I call the “long game” of strategic
research, planning and communication. It is not enough for a company or
organization to decide to simply create a brand image for itself. The brand
must permeate everything the company does, particularly when in view of its
publics.
A brand is much more than just a logo or a
slogan, however. In the minds of consumers, a brand is also encapsulated in the
experiences they have with a company or organization. On college campuses
nationwide, experience has become a
new buzzword because we now understand that it is an integral part of a brand’s
reputation and image in the mind of the consumer. A customer may forget what a
logo looks like or what catchy slogan was employed by a company, but rarely
will consumers forget the experience they had and their emotional responses to
that experience. This is one of the reasons why a relatively unknown online
brand, Zappos, leads almost all online retailers in customer service (source).
Their focus on total satisfaction of the customer has created for themselves a
loyal and expansive customer base where 3 out of every 4 orders are placed by
repeat customers (source).
Their very first core value is to “deliver ‘wow’ through service” (source).
They accomplish this through liberal policies like free shipping and free
returns for up to a year on purchases. Customer service agents are trained to
seek positive outcomes in all customer service situations, and they are given
free rein to make any decision necessary to please a customer — a stark
contrast from the endless list of companies that tie the hands of their CSRs
and leave the customer to hear the dreaded words, “There’s nothing I can do.”
Perhaps we can all learn a lesson from the
success of brands like Zappos and Apple. In the end, the brand is created not
so much by a trendy logo or a smart slogan, but rather by the collective
experiences of a company’s publics. Good branding, then, is created when a
company creates a great culture first which flows from its employees into its
customer experiences, followed by logos and positioning statements that capture
the spirit of that culture.
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