by at 12:12 pm 27 May 2009
Filed under: Home Page
Jacob and Gabor, together with Vueling’s founder Carlos Muñoz, will present at the 
Design Conference in Mainz on June 18. They will highlight the client/advisor relationship between Vueling and Saffron which has produced award-winning work.
by Wally Olins at 11:19 am 13 May 2009
Filed under: Home Page
People in charge of service brands have been trained in the traditional school of creating brands – product brands. Their attempt to manage service brands as though they are product brands has created vast problems. Read on…
by Wally Olins at 11:14 am 13 May 2009
Filed under: Branding
Statistics in most western countries show a relative decline in manufacturing and a growth in services from the mid 1970’s onwards. In the 1990s service businesses went into explosive growth thanks to the internet and deregulation. Service businesses have since become massive brand-builders. Some of the biggest companies in the world are now service companies of one kind or another. Telefonica, Google, Four Seasons, Ryanair, HSBC are all massive brands built around service not products.
Many of the people who are in charge of managing these service brands have been trained in the traditional school of creating great consumer brands – product brands. Their attempt to manage service brands as though they are product brands has created vast problems.
Product brands are about products. Kit Kat, a classic product brand, doesn’t answer back, doesn’t get tired, isn’t anxious, is always ready to perform and always tastes the same. Every experience with a product brand is identical. Service brands aren’t like that. Service brands are about people. People who represent the organisation lose their tempers, get tired and anxious, and sometimes have just had enough that day. Every experience with a service brand is therefore different. For the customer, the person who represents the brand is the brand. If he or she doesn’t perform properly, the relationship between the brand and the customer may collapse.
The implication of this, of course, is that service-based organisations have to focus on their internal audience to a far greater extent than product-based organisations. And this is what the new breed of brand manager is starting to learn. Brand managers like most managers are pretty conservative, they hate change and they cling on to outdated mantras like the belief that the most important audience for the brand is the customer. And it shows – on hold in call centers for hours, putting up with rude airline staff, all that petty harassment which comes from badly managed service brands is now part of our daily life.
Creating happy customers by educating and involving staff in the brand is not rocket science. Unfortunately too many big service brands still aren’t getting it right. It doesn’t have to be that way though. Examples like Vueling show that if internal audiences are taken seriously and time is invested in educating them on what their brand stands for, employees will realise that everything they do reflects on the brand. They will begin to feel brand ownership and do their best to contribute to its success – each in their own capacity.
by Ben Knapp at 11:11 am 12 May 2009
Filed under: Home Page
Will national identities fade into the background as a transnational, truly corporate identity comes to the fore? Will ‘Made by’ trump ‘Made in’?
by Sahil Sachdev at 11:09 am 12 May 2009
Filed under: Branding
India is a global economic and cultural force to be reckoned with. So much is clear. But why haven’t many more Indian brands made their mark on the global stage?
As part of an ongoing Saffron study, we posed this question to the President of Brand Strategy at an Indian Fortune 500 company. His reply was straightforward – the marketing spend required is simply too high. In his opinion, establishing a brand on a global scale requires a huge investment, and the returns are anything but guaranteed.
To become internationally known and respected, he believes, Indian companies will have to grow by acquisition, à la Tata and Jaguar. This, says our interviewee, brings many of the rewards without much of the risk. With current market conditions leaving many major international brands vulnerable to takeover, such an approach becomes all the more viable.
It is possible that the Indian market will recover from the current crisis faster than the rest of the world. If it does, and is able to ‘take advantage’ of the downturn continuing in Europe and America, further acquisitions of large global brands by Indian companies are possible. By the time the slowdown ends, the world could look a very different place.
In it, companies from one part of the world will have to decide how they effectively integrate new acquisitions from a completely different cultural background. This throws up an interesting question – will one national ‘style’ come to dominate, or will national identities fade into the background as a transnational, truly corporate identity comes to the fore? Will ‘Made by’ trump ‘Made in’? Some participants in our study think so. It seems likely, therefore, that some companies will be associated less with where they come from (as with Sony) and more with what they are about (like Nivea).