Chapter 2 : brand IDENTITY SYSTEM

Chapter 1, on brand essence, began with the plea to focus brand communications on the integrated connections your branding process needs to make, before contemplating various targeted news you want to convey. Readers who felt inhibited by this apparent relegation of market targeting to a secondary status may enjoy the multidimensional freedom of expression inherent in the concept of a brand's identity system.

Today, powerful branding goes beyond a name, to invest in a visual design language -of symbols, colours, sub-brands, flagship products, service promises and other identifying reminders which shape the way in which a brand's sphere of business is recalled by our senses. Brands navigate human associations and perceptions by a constellation of reminders, each acting as a consumer code. A powerful corporate or umbrella brand is capable of conveying multiple messages with particular relevance to different audiences, as well as other mind-expanding interpretations of its essence. In the case of global brands, identities need to be crafted as component forms in an international design language. In this chapter, we will see how analysis of the brand identity system enables us to explore the breadth and depth of the universe of associations which a brand has invested in consumers' minds.

The power of a well designed identity system is difficult to over-estimate. We begin with some examples.

McDonald's

If you are aware of McDonald's, you are likely to make many of the following associations with the brand's identity system : Big M logo, Ronald, Big Mac, Mc named menu items, Red and Yellow...

The identity system is a communications tapestry. The brander must keep on asking two questions about this:

·What identifying "threads" are known to everyone who knows the brand?

·How are they working for the branding process - both its consumer heritage and its future business?

These questions should be guided by an informed belief in design impact and aesthetics. Remember:

·There is no point in cluttering the tapestry with another thread unless it is serving some vital purpose

·The identifying threads must all fit together. As part of a pattern, they should provide overall confirmation of a brand's essence. Identities should not directly clash, but subtle tensions can be good. For example, the most fascinating human characters are those who intrigue because they are at once familiar and continuously capable of surprise.

Table 1 shows some interpretations of how the identity system of McDonald's works for the brand. Interrogate this and add your own insights to our list by asking the sorts of questions tabled.

Table 1 : Exploring the identity system of McDonald's whilst confirming the essence of fast food served with home from home values

WHAT? WHAT brand identifiers ( eg colours, symbols, stereotypes, slogans, platforms, famous moments in brand's history, product features, design icons, other appeals to senses etc) are in the minds of your consumers? McDonald's integrates M Ronald Big Mac (also Big Breakfast, Mega Mac) Mc Moscow Red & Yellow ...

HOW? An identity system: · casts leading identifiers with different roles; · connects everything up to achieve multiple effects such as "multi-positioning", "multi-recognition"... What leading interpretations can you find when exploring McDonald's identity system? Which identifiers would you show off where if you were directing the McDonald's brand? Signpost for distant media; nicknamed destination (golden arches) Children's aspect of multipositioning; local community visibility; anchor of family personality Adult appetite aspect of multipositioning; Big codes (eg value); Familiarisation slogans, eg Mac Attack Linking identity for broadening product menu Global and local PR platform Heartwarming impact

To obtain a greater feel of the significance of these identifers to the goodwill invested in - and stewarded by - those who direct the business of McDonald's, read our section on Benchmarking McDonald's (ThinkPiece 1), and then take a second look at table 1.

Marlboro

Some would say the cowboy has proven to be the most valuable branded identifier ever created, in light of the internationally popular image he conferred on the brand and its smokers. But don't underestimate the powers of other Marlboro identifiers such as : red, the device of the red chevron with white backdrop, Marlboro (and Big) Country scenery.

The red chevron has always done a great job in ensuring that Marlboro's pack stands out from the crowd. Think of how many ways this works - from making the Marlboro pack visible on a retailers' crowded shelves to being Marlboro's signature wherever one smoker shares a cigarette with another. Twenty years ago, as a rookie market researcher, one of us was talking to a Marlboro brand manager in the UK. As twentysomething marketing ignorami, we were sharing bewilderment over instructions from Philip Morris New York headquarters that while much of the marketing mix, eg advertising, allowed for a high degree of local flexibility, if the brand manager wanted to change one iota of the brand's packaging design, this had to be signed off in triplicate from HQ.

These days, we confess to a complete u-turn in thinking. We would be bewildered by any owner of a global brand who did not regard packaging design as a strategic property that requires global control. The consistency of Marlboro's red flag is the connecting thread which keeps the whole history of the brand's equity alive. In some countries, cigarette marketing is so highly censored that only two image-building acts remain to support your product:

1) sponsor an abstract global flag - eg Marlboro's red chevron around the world's grand prix motor racing circuits

2) show your package off on retailers' shelves and in consumers' hands.

By owning red in a product category, the brander enjoys the most impactfully differentiated colour as well as the most popular bold one. Of course, most Marlboro smokers are also reminded of Marlboro's wild west legends by their pack's identity - as Marlboro's continuous flag of independence - even if these associations are only latently charged by memories, or refreshed when travelling to countries where Marlboro imagery is free to express its communications tapestry to the full.

In China, you will see a remarkable modern rendering of a brand's identity system, with the Marlboro brand using its red and big country identifiers to extraordinary effect. Imagine a commercial which mixes footage of:

·a popular sports event sponsored by Marlboro, congregated by Chinese youths who are waving red Marlboro flags as part of their supporters' ritual

·Big Country scenery

You only need to think of the Great Wall to realise that the rapport of Chinese people with the Big Country dwarves even that of people in the USA. In this oriental context, Marlboro's red flag connotes the future dreams and inspirations of China's youth as well as being a visual neighbour to their symbol of patriotic familiarity. At a single stroke, the brand becomes the consumer passport to imagineering the evolution from China's history as a great power to an era already beckoning mankind where the Orient is the most dynamic place on planet earth and where China will have a great international role to play.

Budweiser

In the US Budweiser brand, we have an intricate example of how identifiers can be threaded together as consumer codes to portray a national institution. This analysis of Budweiser's identity draws on a book by Sal Randazzo in which Budweiser is called archetypal of a male mythology brand. Says Randazzo:

"The unique power of advertising goes beyond its ability to build and maintain successful, enduring brands by creating perceptual entities that reflect the consumer's values, dreams and fantasies. Advertising turns products into brands by mythologising them - by humanising them and giving them distinct identities, personalities and sensibilities that reflect our own. In some sense, advertising brands have, in our consumption-driven society, come to serve a similar function as the ancient Greeks' pantheon of gods. They function as projection holders wherein we project our dreams, fears and fantasies...

The connection between advertising and mythology seems fairly obvious to me. Myths are more than entertaining little stories about gods, goddesses and heroic characters. The universality of myths, the fact that the same myths recur across time and many different cultures, suggests that they originate from somewhere inside us. Psychoanalyst, Carl Jung said that myths, like dreams, are really projections that emanate from the soul or unconscious psyche. Myths represent humanity's collective dreams, instinctive yearnings, feelings, and patterns of thinking that seem to be hard-wired in humans and that function somewhat like instincts to shape our behaviour".

Table 2 helps to explain "Budweiserness" by suggesting seven of the brand's most significant consumer codes (together with my attempt to translate meanings for non-American readers).

Table 2 : Inventory of US consumer codes identified with Budweiser

Brand Identity	context as American consumer code
Clydesdales	These are shire horses used by Budweiser at promotional events and previously in delivering beer. They fascinate Americans and connote macho images of power, strength and working pride.
Cvolski	Most famous execution of a long running series of slice-of-life ads featuring blue collar workers as America's real heroes
This Bud's for you	Budweiser's long running brand slogan
Red, White & Blue	Brand's packaging colours (corresponding to America's national colours)
American eagle	The company's oldest trademark modelled on the bald eagle (America's national symbol)
Beechwood aging	As Budweiser's product legend declares on every pack, this proprietary process "produces unique taste, smoothness and drinkability - we know of no other brand of beer that costs so much to brew or age"
Genuine article	The heritage of being America's number 1 brand of beer

Some points to digest from Budweiser's inventory of identities are:

·Each identifying code is a valuable property right as a contributor to Budweiser's image bank. Each code has required a large and continuous marketing investment to imprint its association of Budweiser on American consumers' minds.

·Each identifying code is intimately related to Budweiser's essence as a leader - namely being the product hero of the American working male by portraying the American male as (unsung) hero. Budweiser's inventory of identities are engineered to work with each other in developing an integrated picture. It links product connoisseurship with images of working males with the integrity of traditional American values and overall pride in belonging.

·Once you have examined how intimately a brand's vital reserves depend on its inventory of identities in consumers minds, it is difficult to attach credibility to any analysis of brand positioning, brand valuation or brand 'anything' unless it includes an integrated analysis of brand identity.

Kodak

It is prudent to think of the brand name as an audio-visual symbol. It can serve to connect up customers around the world only if they all find it readily pronounceable. Early World Class branders like George Eastman knew this. He christened his camera Kodak because it was 'short, vigorous, incapable of being misspelt ... and meant nothing'.

Kodak's Identity system nicknamed "Big Yellow", remains a source of competitive advantage for the brand today. The ways in which the brand's colours grabbed Japanese attention in the late eighties would surely have made George Eastman proud.

Sky Wars At a time when Fuji and Konica were committed to heavy spending abroad, Kodak spent three times more than both of them combined on advertising in Japan. It erected mammoth $1 million neon signs as landmarks in many of Japan's big cities. Its sign in Sapporo Hokkaido, is the highest in the country. It sponsored sumo wrestling, judo, tennis tournaments and even the Japanese team at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, a neat reversal of Fuji's 1984 coup when it won the race to become the official supplier to the Los Angeles Olympics. Kodak's cheekiest ploy was to spend $1 million on an airship emblazoned with its logo. It cruised over Japanese cities for three years, mischievously circling over Fuji's Tokyo headquarters from time to time. To Fuji's chagrin, Japanese newspapers gleefully picked up the story. The Japanese firm was forced to spend twice as much bringing its own airship back from Europe for just two months of face-saving promotion in Tokyo. Half of all Japanese consumers can now recognise Kodak's goods instantly. kodak's recent growth puts it within sight of second-place Konica in Japan's market for camera film. (The Economist, 10 November 1990)

A creative break

Before further examination of how identities work to create and renew brands , it is worth noting some of the organisational implications of investing in brand identity. Like most of the component frameworks of Brand Chartering, identity system seems to be naturally anchored in one arena of branding, creativity in this case. But interconnections with all other arenas of the brand as business process must be constantly reviewed.

Identifiers represent valuable property rights of the branded communications process. They have often involved significant investment costs to become symbols whose power is proportional to the global share of mind that they have accumulated. In spite of this, archaic national laws do not always provide protection against visual counterfeiting. Wherever this geographical anachronism persists, branded manufacturers must be wary about the extent of their possible exposure.

For example, at the start of 1994 Coca-Cola's UK business was the largest manufacturer's brand monitored by audits of packaged goods products carried out by Nielsen market research. One year later (at time of writing) a proportion of this business has been lost to partnership combinations involving Cott colas, major British retail chains and in some cases host fashion brands, eg Virgin. This vulnerability has not been due to replica products as such - since well formulated own label colas have been around for years. The new cola warriors have been "lookalikes" deploying two identifiers that had previously been Coke's very own : namely red livery and classic associations with Americana.

How did this gap in the brand's defences emerge so suddenly, in spite of Coca-Cola's world of experience? A slightly technical answer is that a manufacturer's "me-too" of another's famous branded identity never proves profitable when both are competing on level playing fields. This is because some of the me-too's communications will be mistaken by consumers as messages for the real thing. Even more will be interpreted by the consumer as an impostor's challenge to their loyalty to an old friend. But the mechanics of competition from a major retailer ( one like Sainsbury's, whose distribution power represent over 10% of grocery purchases made by UK consumers) are different. With only marginal overheads (instead of advertising and other marketing budgets) the retailer can offer product at a lower price, (though this did not make previous own-label colas particularly big business). The sting to the manufacturer's brand comes, from the retailer's control over shelf space. In some UK retailers, consumers have seen red American lookalike colas being given up to four times the display of Coca-Cola's facings where the points of sale are made.

For Coca-Cola this UK lookalike phenomenon is insidious. Its image is becoming diluted and its value undifferentiated, because confirmation of the brand's essence was invested in Coca-Cola's whole visual language, not the mere name.

The drastic impacts of "lookalikes" are so far confined to Britain and a few countries whose attitude to designer's rights might be labelled as "third world", like any country that refuses to recognise artistic copyrights protecting audio, visual or computer software. Britain's isolation in Europe on the lookalike issue was evident from a recent test case in which the UK's leading brand of wine Le Piat D'Or - positioned as French blend for English palate - was able to negotiate a halt to a lookalike offer from the same British supermarket chain that started the Cola wars. Appeals were made won not in UK courts but to French law which was applicable because the wine's bottling was done in France. Until Britain's laws are changed, no manufacturer's branding strategy is secure from the possibility of a lookalike invasion without:

·development of a design that is protectable but more complex than consumers really need

·ownership or long-term partnership of retail channels

·ownership of a scale or other product advantage which cannot be replicated.

Another major organisational issue connected with identity systems involves the networking of design skills. These are increasingly relevant at the interface between tactical and strategic decision-making on the branding process. In chapter 11, Brand Architecture, we discuss how many brands a company needs and how high level banner brands can be designed to connect up much of the company's goodwill with lower level sub-brands targeting local consumer needs. Nestle assigns a lot of its detailed thinking on these matters to visual communications experts who are specifically charged with two major jobs:

·arbitrate in a balanced way between strategic brand requirements from Nestle's headquarters in Vevey (Switzerland) and ideas on brand identities related to marketing initiatives of national subsidiaries

·control the design formats used to ensure that Nestle's banner brands are communicated with global consistency compatible with the consumer image of a world class company and yet sufficiently flexible to connect up with every sub-branding presentation. Figure 1 shows an example taken from the design catalogue of approved ways of representing Nestle's corporate brand:

(Figure 1)

(For further details: see Brand Benchmarking of Nestle in ThinkPiece 1)

Table 3 shows extracts from recent speeches by an executive from American Express. It highlights some intriguing points about the importance of taking corporate identity systems seriously.

Table 3 : "Keeping a brand image up-to-date" (at American Express) I'd love to be able to claim that everything about our brand is the result of thorough research and careful deliberation, but I guess we all know that in real life things don't always work out that way. Take our Centurion, for example. You see him on our Cards and our Travellers Cheques, embodying such brand characteristics as security, integrity, strength, protection, service. We couldn't have created a better symbol if we'd employed droves of researchers and designers and branding consultants. Which we didn't. The truth is altogether more serendipitous. We owe our Centurion to an explosion of forgery after the Second World War. In the postwar years our Travellers Cheques became hugely popular, not only with travellers but also with counterfeiters. We desperately needed a harder-to-forge design, but at the time new engravings could have taken a year or more. So we asked our printers, the American Bank Note Company, to help - and from a dusty shelf they produced this guy; he'd been engraved for another job which had never been printed. From the obscurity of a printer's store-cupboard he's gone on to become one of the best-known brand marks in the world - proving that great symbols aren't always made to measure. You can sometimes get them - literally - off the shelf. ... In 'Project Jigsaw', we recently undertook a complete revamp of our visual identity. We laid out all our direct mail packs and product literature and they looked as if they had come from a whole bunch of different companies. So we needed to reassert a consistent visual style that every part of the company could use. But Project Jigsaw went far deeper than a routine rethink of graphics and typography : it examined the style and tone of voice we use when we talk to our customers and potential customers. Let me quote you a few sentences from the internal manual that resulted from Project Jigsaw: 'The transition from the 80's to the 90's was traumatic. People who were happy participants in our 'prestige dream' have changed. They now speak about getting value. Words like 'exclusive', 'privilege' and 'select' seemed to permeate every level of our communication. The tone and manner generally suggested someone who felt he was getter than most...but attempts to apply this florid (and, to today's ear, pompous) language across a wide array of marketing communications ended up working against us...looking old-fashioned and out-of-date. People talk about the world moving forward and American Express lagging behind".' In short, our brand attributes and values might have been as good as ever, but the way we were presenting them had lost its relevance. So what are we doing about it now? Again, I quote from the manual: 'Our tone and manner should reflect those of a service company...a group which consistently reinvents itself to meet and exceed it customers' changing needs and expectations. Our voice should no longer be from the 'Chairman of the Club's Membership Committee' or from a disembodied global corporation that's full of itself. Rather, it should be the voice of a consultant... a skilled, flexible and entrepreneurial advisor and supplier. Someone who earns his customer's trust through performance nit promises. A competent, confident professional.' And that, I think is the essence of everything we're doing to bring our brand up-to-date. The values don't change but the audience's perceptions do. The attributes don't change but the presentation must. In conclusion, I think the most important step we've taken in renewing our brand image is to be honest with ourselves; to listen to what customers were saying and admit that our corporate style had become outmoded. Once we'd taken that on board, we could see that a new style of advertising would help, but that advertising alone would not be enough.A brand is a very public thing."

The brand identity system offers immense power to the brand-oriented company, but the use of this capability by many twentieth century brand owners has been underwhelming. Why?

One reason, frankly admitted by American Express, is "honesty" about an organisation's current weaknesses. The biggest impediment to valuable evolution of service values in every great company is often arrogance. It takes a subtle blend of modesty simultaneously to be proud of being number 1 and continuously to interrogate whether your presentation values are up-to-date.

Marketers have sometimes tended to enjoy advertising as a sexy activity where you subcontract out dream-making to an external agency. In contrast, designing a corporately branded identity immediately involves the laborious business of serving the lifestyles you present. Here, the point to reiterate from Amex's confession is that : true service unites performance and promise. In fact, one good test of a design consultant is the extent to which (s)he converts you to the service theme. Avoid those who fail to make this point, because they may hit you with artistic brilliance but run away from the deeper organisational issues involved. Conversely, one of the best design consultants we have ever met was adamant that the first slogan of marketing should be that "all brands are services". We last met him preaching this gospel at every operating level of a World Class packaged goods company, and promising to excommunicate anyone who referred to the company as a manufacturer.

Now that we have developed more of a feeling for identity systems, take a deeper look at some of the initial questions we suggested every brander should keep on asking about identity systems which (s)he is operating.

What consumer codes are identified with the brand?

Often, the brander will end up with quite a long list for each brand. If appropriate, cluster them where they have similar meanings and try to locate the topmost one which most clearly represents each cluster.

Then start classifying:

·Which of these associations come for free with the product's visibility? - Eg the colour of your pack if one has been consistently chosen, or if you are really lucky your personifying icon, eg the Centurion of American Express.

·Which involve a heavy investment to keep in consumers minds? - Eg an advertising slogan is usually a heavy investment. It will usually need a lot of repetition if it is to stay in consumers' minds. It may take literally 5% of all your advertising time spent and probably more than that in terms of your share of consumers' attention. It will usually be at the expense of establishing some other consumer code.

·Which of these consumer codes are strategic? - Eg being a vital confirmation of the brand's essence or a permanent part of the brand's visual recognition. Which of the codes are tactical or transitional? Eg helping the brand to compete on a fad value in the local market but something that you do not expect to be permanently associated with the brand.

These details are worth clarifying before the brand team addresses the purpose of each consumer code : How exactly are we using this identifier in the brand process?

- eg, what does it do for the brand in consumers' minds in relation to 1) recognising, 2) purchasing, 3) enjoying the brand?

Table 4 shows that quite a long list of answers are available, and it is there for you to add to them.

Table 4 - HOW IS THE BRAND'S IDENTITY SYSTEM WORKING? Strong brands use identifiers to work in many, many ways. HOW? Make a list of all the ways in which your brand's identity system must compete for consumer attention, such as: ·General recall of brand as top of mind ·Specific recall of brand as top of mind (eg occasion of use, calendar of mind) ·Heighten visibility/recognition of brand (eg impact in a specific media or on a new platform) ·Badge brand with personality or other image to wear ·Extend a brand ·Endow a brand with a stereotype bringing instant cosmopolitan appeal ·Local buy-in to a globally branded phenomenon ·Develop architectural strengths of high level brands (eg corporate/banner brands, see chapter 11) ·Build linkages between brands (eg corporate brand and product sub-brand) ·General reminder of brand essence ·Pre-emptive (eg symbolic) ownership of brand essence ·Souvenir of brand essence (or other empathy translator) ·Connect up values of flagship brands to benefit other brands ·Seed a brand's cachet ·Brand a word-of-mouth legend ·Identify a brand's own PR platform ·Transition a brand through evolution of its identity system ·Translate essence into lifestyle or service guarantee·Express a corporate tone of voice; a cultural style

Identity for Brand Recall

Historically, packaging and product design have often been sidelined from their role as a brand's first (and almost-free) medium. We are now witnessing the passing of an era of mass communications where advertising agencies, as their name suggests, had certain biases as creative suppliers, particularly towards the provision of tv advertising, and away from helping to integrate design and other forms of communications that holistic brand identity systems need to exploit.

Notably, brand recall can tap a richer spectrum of brand power than many branders practised when results of communications campaigns were routinely judged by superficial measurements of advertising and brand name awareness. These measurements were made by market researchers paid for "precision", defined by the amount of data they collected and the standardisation of formulae they used in number-crunching.

Now that brands are increasingly aiming to be umbrellas for various products, there are many new subtleties in the ways that brand awareness works in consumers' minds. They cannot be calculated merely from such basic market research questions as : which brand names (or advertising) do you think of spontaneously when I mention a particular product? Or which brands do you know when I prompt you with a list of names?

One way to identify valuable brand recall involves uniquely associating a brand with an occasion of use that is a vital part of every consumer's diary. For example, from Malaysia we see how simply "Showertime is Lux Time" associates the Lux brand with taking a shower - what a suitable diary entry in a humid country for the Lux brand's core range of beauty cleansing products. It is easy to imagine why a Lux brand manager should rather have Lux spontaneously return to mind every time a consumer thinks of the joy of taking a shower than when questioned generally and out of the blue by a market researcher.

(Figure 2)

Identity for taking advantage of new and global media

Today's global media calls often provide only a fleeting glimpse of the brand, whether this is as the sponsor of an advertising hoarding behind the goal on a football pitch or of the player's shirt or of the backdrop to the interview after the game. Clearly, concise brand identifiers like capital M of McDonald's or the Coke of Coca-Cola work to ensure that their brands can play with the best in front of global audiences. So do such gems for brand names as the four lettered Mars and Sony or the three lettered Lux. One consequence of the natural visibility that short brand names command is that you are now unlikely to find any name which is :

·globally pronounceable and

·clean (ie free of unfortunate connotation in someone's mother tongue) with

·four letters or less which has not already been registered as somebody's trademark

Table 5 provides an Italian souvenir of how the suitably identified global brand stands out from the crowd.

Table 5 : Worldwide footage Unlike local brands, the world class identity also enjoys making cost-effective use of such global media spots as trackside hoardings at the Olympic Games. Being seen in the neighbourhood of other world class brands is to inherit a state of international approval which local brands cannot muster. Subliminally, historical replays of such global media events create a cumulative sense of discrimination between brands with world class status and those with something rather less. Alongside the footballing superstars of Italia's 1990 World Cup, the serious competitive pitch was reserved for brand hoardings. As events turned out, many of these identities looked under-rehearsed to play their part behind the scenes, being handicapped by over-long names or graphic logos designed to exploit media opportunities offering more time or space in front of the audience. In contradistinction, one four-lettered word made use of every camera angle. The MARS house colours - dramatic red with gold bordering and black background - proved to be a stylish flag for the confectioner's global panache. By easily scoring the most global rating points, the Mars branding was the visible winner of the championship. World Class Brands (1991), Chris Macrae

And, of course, it's not just global media sponsors that are prone to materialise in fleeting glimpses from the crowded brandscape of our mass communications society. Think how many identifiers flash by the city worker on an average commuter's journey, or the shopper travelling with a trolley through the aisles of a hypermarket.

Identity for brand image and brand personality

Marlboro without the cowboy would never have got started as a global brand; Lacoste without the alligator would have no fashionable meaning. The competitive make-up of brands whose products are primarily consumed in social settings requires an identifier which badges the brand with an image for consumers to wear.

Throughout this book, you may detect many subtle ways that we suggest personality icons - in human and animal forms - give their brands extra metamorphic powers. At this stage, just a short list of illustrative examples is:

·Introduce a dramatic new value to the brand - eg Amex's centurion

·Make the brand more personally recallable to occasional purchasers - eg Johnnie Walker in the seasonal market of Scotch Whisky

·Give the brand child - and therefore family - appeal : eg McDonald's Ronald or Disney's cast of animal characters

·Authenticate a slogan through the brand's announcer - eg the way Tony the Tiger establishes that Kelloggs Frosties are Grr..rreat

·Stereotype a brand's essence without saying a word - eg the power of any advertising copy which features Esso's Tiger

·Merge fantasy and fashion - eg Lacoste's Alligator

Identity for brand extendibility

A particularly interesting challenge facing many companies who are finding that one-product brands are no longer economic involves extending (some would say stretching) the brand. Table 6 is only a slight exaggeration of how a poor frame for brand extension decision-making is something which brand decision-makers can ill afford.

Table 6 : Which of these alternative approaches to brand extending is more sensible? ·Option 1 : Stretch the brand instantly by announcing that new product X is now offered by the brand ·Option 2 : Review whether the brand has any identifying codes which are relatable to product X: ->If yes, brief your advertising agency to help consumers interpret the brand's extension to the new product by portraying the brand in a way that emphasises the relevant codes as signposts to and from the brand consumers know to the new product you wish to announce ->If no, and in the absence of other brand alternatives, integrate into your brand's identity system a relevant new identifier and only once this has been cultivated proceed to announce the new prod using the new identifier as signpostThrough the process of extending a brand, the ultimate difference between these options can be "all or nothing". By enabling consumers to interpret where you are going, option 2 allows a brand to become all that its leadership essence is capable of. By confusing consumers, option 1 can end up diluting the consumers' feel for brand essence until the brand's relationship has lost all its meaning. Yet, in the 1990s as brand extendibility has increasingly become the most valuable creative talent associated with branding, many companies have adopted option 1 either in an ill considered rush to obtain new product revenues or through failure to develop an organised understanding of brand identity systems. Unfortunately, faddish frameworks (often compounded by measurements of so-called proven - ie historical - brand power like brand valuation and early US research into brand equity) seem to have been accessories to the folly of disorganised stretching of brands. The acid test for any framework on the future power of the brand revolves round prioritising the following line of questioning : Does this framework recognise that a brand's future power is largely leveraged - positively or negatively - by what you creatively make of it? In particular, is it agreed that the most relevant communications creativity involved in extending a brand is that which helps consumers to translate their imaginative connections between : ·where your new products and service values are going to, and ·where they think your brand is coming from?

Identity for enabling global and local communications

You may find some clues to construction of strong brand identifiers by brainstorming how human languages work:

·Brands contribute characters to an experiential language designed for human exploration of quality and value - a language which is the first truly global and local one. Presence in the mind depends on the consistency, creativity and visibility with which a brand makes particular values its own. Key identifiers assist in this process both by adding particular nuances to a brand and by being devices which heighten recall. Ultimately, just as familiarity governs which words you choose most regularly to express yourself, familiarising devices breed a comforting inclination towards certain brands; just as some words appear to have a particularly distinguishing tone, some brands strike irreplaceable personal chords.

·One particular power of the brand is to mix image with reality. For example, brands can work like package tours that transport the human imagination without the physical strain of leaving home. Most consumers now enjoy perceiving a mixture of local and international offerings to be at their front doors. Appeals to our local senses remind us of our roots, offers of cosmopolitan experiences broaden our horizons. Indeed, John Naisbitt advises that one of the megatrends for our third millennium involves "the blending of global lifestyles and cultural nationalism"

·Unsurprisingly, identity themes which dominate branding's universal design either resonate with appeals to human fantasies or are stereotypical of human needs. Much of this canvass of branding concentrates on the themes shown in Table 7. To be effective communicators, most identifiers refer to some extent to the interpretive conventions which other brands or widely known entities have already established. It is unwise to identify yourself in a competitive vacuum since it is necessary to relate to codes which consumers already know how to read.

Table 7 : Predominant themes referenced by branding's universal design codes · Countries · Clubs and other affiliative institutions confirming belonging or belief systems · Male/Female roles (more specifically: Male for impressing Females, Male for Males, Female for Males, Female for Females) · Friendships, smiles, humour · Fun/appeal to children's imagination, family rewards · Mothering/growing/Environmental concerns/home-from-home comforts · Rebels, youth, adolescence, artistic freedom, power to the people · Sun, seasons, nature · Purity/good health · State-of-art/science/modernity · Self-indulgence/treat/pleasure/fantasy · Status/self-achievement · Biggest/World's number 1/ Leader's guarantee · Celebration occasions:anniversaries/rewards · Symbol of good fortune/tradition · Safety/simplicity/stability · Power/strength/confidence

The inclusion of local identifiers gives a global brand identity system much needed flexibility. It can also allow local consumers the pleasure of feeling that they are improving a global institution.

Identity for brand architecture and high level brands

As we have seen, the McDonald's brand language demonstrates one way of establishing a multi-dimensional communications format facilitating all the linkages that high level corporate and banner brands need to exploit. Its multiple communication territories include:

·the geographical : global and local

·consumer segment : from children to adults

·usage occasions : from Breakfast to Drive-away snack

·menu of products : from burgers to nuggets to pizzas

When constructing the constellation of identifying effects that a coherent brand architecture needs, remember:

·Each brand or sub-brand has its own essence, but there should also be transfusion synergies between these essences

·Each identifier should make at least one specific "how to use" contribution: either to a particular brand or as the linkage between two or more brands

·The constellation of effects of all the identity systems in the brand architecture should be more than the sum of the parts.

It is because of McDonald's constellation of consumer codes that it is difficult ( almost impossible?) for any business to attack McDonald's directly - Is McDonald's fast food? Family entertainment centre? Cosmopolitan meeting place and break from city pressures?...It is all of these at one and the same time.

Identity as an essential advantage

Hershey's is America's favourite chocolate company. The company has never seemed to share the passion for global marketing of its major indigenous rival the Mars company. Because of this, Hershey's has had to try that much harder to stay closer to American hearts and minds in a business environment where in Sir Adrian Cadbury's words "you cannot afford to be in the second division" because recognition as an industry leader, economy of scale and world class production competences are critical success factors. Hershey's achieves its special rapport with American families to a large extent through the means of its "Hugs" and "Kisses" brands which are notable identities for the following reasons:

·In the English language, these are cosy brand names for playing confectionery's role in family bonding

·"Hugs" and "Kisses" are bite size chocolate morsels that are probably the smartest individually packaged brand units that a few cents can buy

·The brands' shape, wrappings and product patterns - Kisses are a mosaic of dark and white chocolate - involve a production complexity that required a large upfront investment. Hershey's therefore feels confident that neither manufacturer nor retailer could affordably imitate Hugs and Kisses. Regarded as a marketing platform

- over the long lifetime of the Hugs and Kisses brands - the high cost of investment in production technology is in reality a low cost branding delivery system.

·Moreover, as flagship brands in Hershey's brand architecture, Hershey's Hugs and Kisses are affordable entry tickets for each new American generation to the chocolate world of Hershey's. Arguably, the success of every Hershey brand depends on their familial connections to Hugs and Kisses. While these identities may be largely America's own, they are the foundations of a world class branding process judged on the criteria of the unique values they deliver to their consumers and to their corporate owner.

Seeding, ie identifying a brand's cachet prior to mass marketing

From Lacoste to Haagen-Dazs, a remarkable number of famous brands seeded their reputations, in some cases up to haute couture levels, by winning stylistic acclaim or becoming word of mouth cult fashions among opinion leaders - before they spent money on mass marketing media. As Table 8 shows Lacoste was one of the first brands to cultivate its image from an individual sportsman's prowess.

Table 8 - Looking into the Legend of Lacoste The brander should never forget that the typical consumer test of a symbol is : how pleasing is it the hundredth time your eyes meet up with it? This helps to explain why the most productive symbols have a certain cleanness of style, a hidden simplicity rather than a showy complexity. Consider Lacoste's alligator. This is one of the world's most successful brand trademarks and has come to be pitched on probably the most impactful advertising hoarding - namely, people's breasts. It works both subliminally and supraliminally to confirm the brand's stylistic essence of "being abreast of an adult sense of humour". How was this brand conceived? Rene Lacoste was a French tennis player and a hero in Davies Cup competitions of the twenties. Lacoste acquired the nickname of the alligator and a girlfriend embroidered an alligator on a blazer he wore on the courts. And that's where the brand's star was born. World Class Brands (1991), Chris Macrae

In the Benchmarking of Haagen-Dazs (see ThinkPiece 1), you can note that the brand's exotic, Scandinavian-sounding origins down to its diphthong were the invention of a New York ice cream manufacturer. And the brand's global expansion through seeding methods of communications has pioneered new standards of creative efficiency. Do not be critical of this inventive process. All global brands have a duty to consider exploiting almost free mythological transfer to the utmost as this provides a brand's stakeholders with a better deal than the multi-billion dollar scoops of advertising that may otherwise be required for a brand to gain global share of mind.

Identity as a brand's own PR platform

Beaujolais' global birthday party as a branded PR event is world class. The "new Beaujolais" arrives. Can you think of any brand which has established its own PR day on the world's calendar with greater economy of resources?

Identities for transitioning a brand

Through investment in a system of interconnecting identities, brands can be transitioned through major evolutionary stages by phasing identifiers in and out while maintaining sufficient identities at any moment to ensure perceptual continuity. This process needs to be thought about very carefully, particularly where a brand derives a great deal of impact from action replays from the past. Sometimes these replays take place metaphorically in consumer's memory traces; sometimes literally, eg because a brand was a prominent sponsor of an event at which a world record was established. Three examples of transitioning a brand's identities illustrate the diversity of this process.

·McDonald's.

Ronald was proceeded by a completely different human icon Mr Speedy. Speedy was caricatured as a hamburger headed man and helped to popularise the notion of fast food while this consumer category was in its infancy. Mr Speedy was retired from the McDonald's identity system back in 1962 once two hundred McDonald's franchises were up and running

·From Marathon to Snickers

During the 1980s, the Mars company tidied up several local brand names. For example, in the UK the Marathon chocolate bar was rechristened with the product's international name Snickers, so that UK consumers could in future relate to the global sporting stages where this brand was increasingly billed to appear. It is claimed that Marathon's consumers had little difficulty in adapting to this name change. The bar's traditional brown, blue and white packaging was so clearly differentiated on shopping shelves that visual identification with the brand took over while the brand's name was changing.

·From Darkie to Darlie

"Pandemonium in a toothpaste" was the way that the Herald Tribune headlined the controversy over Darkie during the late 80s. The brand was a sufficiently strong market leader in various Asian countries that Colgate decided to acquire an interest in the Hong Kong company which owned the brand. Unfortunately, the Darkie trademark, which gave the brand's packaging a prominent identity, was a black man with shining white teeth. While not distasteful to Asians, sections of American society, including some of Colgate's shareholders, found this racist. Colgate's solution in transitioning this brand's identity system is shown in Figure 3.

Identity as a corporate tone of voice, service lifestyle and cultural state of being

As illustrated earlier in this chapter by American Express and McDonald's, and as investigations into most meaningful banner brands will show, top level opportunities of branding are derived by unifying investments in a company's communication processes as much as possible. Can branding, corporate identity, PR, cultural mission, service training etc be directed as an integrated communications process instead of being managed as separate activities? All communications should be organised to confirm a business's leadership purpose and to serve the various stakeholders of the company in an equitable way. Increasingly, corporate goodwill is cultivated in the most consistent manner by recognising that many stakeholders interact with each other and people of the topmost importance to your company will often play a variety of stakeholding roles through the lifetime relationships that really valuable branding offers.

Summary

Branding (or whatever word you use for an organisation's added value communications process) invests identities in the minds of consumers (and all stakeholders of the company). Identifiers go beyond a brand's name creating a design language which includes symbols, colours, sub-brands, flagship products, service promises, slogans and other perceptual prompters. This investment needs continuous and integrated cultivation if it is to be properly harvested tactically and strategically.

An organised branding process depends on:

·business teams sharing up-to-date knowledge on what consumer codes are owned by the company

·being committed to serve the values and differentiated meanings that stakeholders may globally and locally interpret to reside in the codes which identifiers represent

·coherently foreseeing connections between investments in branding's identity systems and other process parameters which contribute to organisational form and successful evolution of core businesses.

Every widely recognised identifier owned by a company is a communications property right which should be making a purposeful contribution to added value or competitive advantage. This chapter illustrates the spectrum of capabilities that identity systems can be used to evolve and the values they (re)create.

Throughout a company's brand architecture, identifiers contribute to a constellation of essentially differentiated sources of power (ie brands) and the ways in which goodwill connections can be interweaved to be more than the sum of their parts (ie linkages between different levels of branding from corporate/banner brand to product sub-brand).

-> For an agenda of a typical Brand Identity System workshop, refer to ThinkPiece 2.

Chapter 3 - brand HERITAGE FRIENDSHIP

The communications power of the brand is amplified by:

·its history - the defining moments which made it famous, exciting and relevant as a cultural leader

·its consumption meanings at an intimately personal level, eg its values as a friend and character

·its accessibility, ie there's no point being famous or a friend unless you're there when needed "in mind (eg breadth and depth of recall) and in body (eg strength of distribution)".

The brand's power to make relationships can become an in-depth exploration of connections made with any audience - eg refer to the importance we attached in chapter 1 to what the brand's essence was to each of the 3C's of end-consumers, channels (eg retail customers) and company (eg employees).

Consumers admire a brand which feels as if it knows where it is going. And is proud of the leadership standards which it has displayed in the past. Every meaningful brand has a lot of company knowhow built into it as well as an essential platform for being the consumer reference point.

Neglect of a great brand's history of meanings can be very costly to a company. Here are eight reasons why organisation-wide appreciation of this statement matters. We will begin with memories from consumer heartland, and build up to the thesis that branding values are most strongly perpetuated when consumer and company lifestyles are bound up in one enduring relationship.

1) Heritage Beliefs

In many product categories, brand heritage is the most important property of all. For example, the average age of the world's top 30 spirits brands is over 100 years old. And German lagers market themselves as brewed to purity regulations of 1516 which probably sets a record as far as the history of quality control goes. Make your own list of why heritage values have vital meanings to consumers in your markets. Examples may include:

·A family or seasonal habit past through generations

·A heartwarming souvenir of good times

·A well known quantity, eg something which you can give to someone else and know it will be appreciated

·Trust in something which has never disappointed you

·Something which turns you into a connoisseur

...

We will return to some of these reasons later, but for the moment note that you could dig deeper into each of these and develop detailed relationship scripts. For example, is connoisseurship in your brand's script mainly about pride in a personal possession -(eg reminding the consumer of his/her own expertise) or being a social talking point (eg a subject which you can use as a conversation opener)?

Organisational forms and communications media may be changing fast, but basic human motivations do not. Most of branding's most compelling interpersonal keys are there - in the history of branding - for all to see, dig deep into and then contemporise in appropriately analogous settings.

Powerful as heritages are at personal levels, their superpowers are derived from being recognised by society as part of the fabric of life. Some of the biggest institutionalised meanings may not even seem to be brands. But why are diamonds (instead of some other substance) so widely recognised as an essential symbol of marriage? Because De Beers has consistently marketed them that way. Or why is champagne the drink for your biggest celebrations? Because the champagne houses in Reims cooperated to brand this essential meaning as their collective raison d'etre.

In the symbiotic way that mass communications work, branded beings can go wider than their organisational parents. For example, they may come to be leading ambassadors of the countries that founded them. Ask the world's consumers what Americana is and you will see how intimately branded heritages of the likes of Disney, Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Levi's etc reside in the mind maps of humankind around the globe. Or look into the mirror of Ferrari in Table 1.

Table 1 : What sums up Italian culture? "Ferrari - it is all that is beautiful" So goes the consensus reply in Italy. And author Andrew White, in "The Centenary of the Motor Car", is only a shade less passionate "Motoring would not be the same without Ferrari; in the case of motor racing it can be said with certainty that 'Ferrari is a cult; Ferrari is Italy". Ferrari is the ultimate dream car. It has speed, grace, beauty and a roll of honour that runs from here to Le Mans. Ferrari has won 9 driver's world championships, 8 Formula One constructor's world championships and 14 sportscars championships. And certainly Ferrari is symbolic of Italy. Stylish, cool, sophisticated - it couldn't have been built anywhere else. To Italians it is more than that. Through post-war Italy's troubled times, Ferrari was there contributing to the rehabilitation of national pride - gaining respect throughout the world both industrially and in sporting terms. Ferrari's universally known insignia - a prancing horse, the cavallino rampante - is even further seeped in Italian history. Legend has it that this was originally the personal emblem affixed to the fuselage of a fighter plane by a gold medal winning pilot in the first world war. He died, but his parents presented a portrait of the horse to Enzo Ferrari when he won the 1923 Circuito di Ravenna. In turn Ferrari adopted this as his firm's logo, representing it against a yellow background - the symbolic colour of his native city Modena where Ferrari's production facilities remain to this day. brand strategy, 28 October 1994

2) Making Friends

It has been said that most of the globe's city dwellers now see more brandscapes than landscapes. Our living conditions involve brand messages projected all around us - a thousand or more commercial propositions every day if you stopped to count everyone you met, which of course you don't. Instead we screen most brand messages out. We all make personal dichotomies of "in" brands from the strangers outside. Some of our "in" brands we just about tolerate attending to, or may be on the verge of dismissing to out-that-was-in (a third state which marketers would technically be right to classify as different to a brand that has never been "in"). But others among our "in" brands are good friends in various senses of the phrase - sometimes as a virtue of necessity, sometimes as characters we have a real attraction to.

Add to this personal list of examples of sources of brand friendship:

·Familiarity, it's become a routine part of my day - eg does the same brand meet you at every breakfast time? ·Simplicity, it makes choosing easy - eg amongst dozens of purchases for the household I make every week, most are routine or frankly boring. In all honesty, I shop on auto-pilot in many categories. If I'm buying replacement batteries - I just want them to last a long-time, fit the appliance and be safe. The brand which I recognise as communicating simply that is a good sort to know. It saves my time and is hassle free. ·Habit, I have been a customer there for twenty years and I am too lazy to change -eg my bank. ·Best Friend, if you don't think that some brands make deep friendships, you have probably never let your children near Ronald McDonald! ·Image, like the clothes I wear, being seen with this brand is part of my image and the impression I make on my peers, and myself ·Mood changer, when I want a break from writing/reading this book I have been known to reach out for my favourite chocolate bar. ·Fan club, I have bought that brand so often that to tell you the truth when I see it in the news I applaud it - and myself. Rather like you might applaud your football club when it's had a winning day.

From a list like this we can start to make some observations on modus operandi for forming brand relationships based on consumers' viewpoints. It is strange how quickly executives in smart offices can forget some of these most basic points. This applies especially to committees of executives and this is one reason why we are keen that this chapter dramatises the importance of brand history to every teamworker involved in Brand Chartering. Do please expand this partial listing of communications mechanics which brands work with in forming relationships with consumers:

·Many of a brand's befriending devices can appear corny if you are not "into" the particular brand. For example, this can apply to caricature ways of presenting a brand whether in personified form like Ronald or logo form like Nike's swoosh mark. Here are some of the designed-in histories which people who are "into" the brand may be seeing:

·With all-the-family brands, it is highly appropriate to be able to appeal to the youngest member of your audience even if the device is twee to adults. Similarly, with brands intent on being multicultural, naive symbols often work best. For example, if a logo like Lacoste's alligator raises a twinkle of a smile in any culture we would rather own that than something that is more sophisticated.

·Loyal consumers meet their brand hundreds and thousands of times. What really matters to them is the impression the brand confirms, not the first impression it makes on a stranger. For "in" consumers a brand will also be a bundle of connecting memories, many of the more significant ones cannot be experienced unless you have actively participated in Purchasing-Consuming-Witnessing the brand.

Role playing of brand by purchaser as a function of P-C-W meaning
Purchasers' roles Image to wear Self-consolation Gatekeeping Gifting...	Purchasers <-> self self housewifeself	Consumers <-> self self housewife/familyfriend	Witnesses peers nobody family/neighboursfriend's peers

·Brand recall is often crafted to being situational in the sense that brand memories should come flooding back at significant times such as when a purchasing choice is being made or a consuming experience is taking place. We know of many brands whose real power is reserved for these occasions. Consequently, if you ask a consumer about a brand out of context - as much market research is prone to do - you are likely to miss many of the most subtle points of the brand's relationship.

·Consistency is vital to branding relationships of the sorts we have described. Changes to the brand's core communicating devices need to be made in emotionally caring ways. Subtle branded values are most at risk of being murdered by any brand management system where frequent rotations of marketing personnel and brands are made. If a brand has a deeply meaningful relationship with consumers, it would seem to be common sense that a new manager has a lot to learn to get a real feeling for the brand. This is particularly the case if there is an organisational absence of a system like Brand Chartering for effecting the handover of care for a brand.

·There are also some costly side-effects of brand relationships which are worth digesting. Because many of branding's lesser relationships are trading on consumer sufferance due to lack of urgent need to change a habit, we know of many brand decision-making instances where organisations have allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security. Typically branded goodwill can protect an organisation even as it becomes less and less competitive until suddenly the poor value of the offer makes even the most loyal consumer think again. If your business team is not fully aware of empirical brand diffusion patterns of this sort, it comes as quite a shock how consumers are prone to flock together, perhaps because of a price rise that has gone over some common psychological precipice or in the case of a brand leader the loss of its goodwill halo effect - which can explain up to 25% of its business at stroke - once the brand has visibly lost its number one status to a rival contender. An aim of Brand Charterers is to fuse together branding analogies so that unnecessary organisational shocks like these never take place.

·If you want to gain a deeper understanding of the quality of your brand's emotional relationships with consumers, most of the analogues with human relationships are worth exploring. For example, consumers can give revealingly consistent answers to what kind of person a brand would be or what kind of mood they associate with a brand. Similarly, most of the ways that people express themselves are applicable to brands. Valuable brands do have their own tones of voice, style rules, idiosyncrasies and creative ways of coping with conflicting tensions which have over time made their characters pleasingly multidimensional. In a word : mature.

Brand friendships are reflections of human nature. People to brand relationships have many similarities to interpersonal ones. For example, you probably have an inner circle of friends with whom you feel familiar. Whilst not always being able to explain what might appear to be logically borderline classifications between inner friends and mere acquaintances, there are usually deeply emotional reasons even if some of these are sourced in the historical serendipity of being in the right place at the right time.

3) Extraordinary Recognition

The making of "in-out" relationships is a primary purpose of branding because of the advantage of being closer to end consumers and their purchasing decisions, but it is certainly not a solitary purpose. Consider this extract form Sal Randazzo's excellent book "Mythmaking on Madison Avenue":

The Green Giant is counted among the so-called Leo Burnett critters that include Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna and Morris the Cat. The Green Giant's humble beginnings were the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, founded in 1903. The company chugged along until the early 1920s when it developed a seed that produced peas that were unusually large and tender. The code name for the new peas was "Green Giant", and in 1926 the image of a Green Giant became the trademark for the company's superior peas.

Then in the early 1930's, a young copyrighter named Leo Burnett entered the picture. Burnett changed the image of the Green Giant and made it more friendly and appealing. He also introduced a new descriptor "jolly".

Through the years both the brand and the company prospered. The Green Giant became one of the most widely recognised trademarks, and in 1950, on the advice of The Leo Burnett Advertising Agency, the Minnesota Valley Canning Company changed its name to the "Green Giant Company". This proved to be a wise decision for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that, when the company went public in the 1960s, the name carried with it instant recognition and respect.

The Green Giant character works on a number of levels:

It works to engage and entertain the consumer by lending a sense of drama and intrigue to an otherwise unexciting category

Once the consumer is engaged, the Green Giant character communicates important product attributes: quality, freshness, and consistency

The character also works as a mnemonic, an immediately recognisable brand trademark and symbol

As a friend puts it : "I have never bought any canned vegetables in my life. But I still recognise jolly good characters like the Green Giant as standing out above and beyond the duty of branding consumer loyalty. They embed themselves in the human imagination even when you are not a target of the company's current products." And that's a great asset, because brand recognition and reputation also counts with every kind of non-consumer stakeholder including those featured in the above extract (company staff, shareholders and trade).

4) Action Replays

Powerful brands make the most of action replays in many ways. A simple way into this realm is activated by having the equivalent of a brand's photo album at the business team's fingertips for every PR occasion. International brands are getting more and more photo calls as journalists write up their stories. They often appear as the props if not the stars of news features crafted for cosmopolitan audiences. Which comes first in terms of celebrity status : basketball as a famous sport? The world's best basketball player? Or Nike? Any brand which successfully travels across international markets and decades needs newsworthy aspects of its heritage to propagate - its own source of (hi)stories as a leader. And, once you appreciate that lifestyle journalism for cosmopolitan consumption can only instantly refer to the relative rare breed of icons that already have internationally recognised meanings, you may plot the particular advantages of having an internationalised press kit assembled for your brand.

Market histories are dominated by leaders who leave traces of brand memorabilia behind both physically and in the popular imagination. This is evident in museums of technology - from cars to electronic products. And in public retrospective of fashions, as well as more privately treasured possessions. Brand memorabilia also plays a part in themed settings such as those that create the atmosphere of many bars and restaurants.

Increasingly brands - by investing in sports and other forms of dynamic media - circulate through timepaths which work in far more diffuse ways than the specifically scheduled 30-second spot of television's commercial break.

Defining moments in history are now global stages on which branders aim to play their part. The opening of McDonald's in Moscow captured a symbolic moment of a new era in history; so was Coca-Cola's sampling at Checkpoint Charlie as the Berlin Wall fell.

One moment with the historic impact of McDonald's Moscow opening gains goodwill for the branded organisation amongst a wide variety of stakeholders. There are valid grounds for believing that this single corporate act has improved the power of McDonald's in the eyes of all of the following :

·Consumers in Moscow and globally

·Society in Russia and globally

·Staff in Moscow and globally

·Franchise owners - current and prospective

·Journalists in Russia and globally

·Shareholders and city analysts

(See ThinkPiece 1 on Brand Benchmarking of McDonald's)

For all these kinds of stages to be valuable, there must be sufficient visual continuity of the brand for action replays to be recognisable when consumers of today and tomorrow revisit history and history and all the parts the brand has played. It also helps if every product ever associated with a brand looks like a leading representative of its historic time zone. Every long-term brand should consider using design as its first media, and moreover one that it owns.

Brands can also become the heros of global legends. Some of these plays have consciously been scripted to turn the brand into a commercial myth - a classical icon -for their corporate owners. For example, in the ThinkPiece 1 on the Brand Benchmarking of Coca-Cola we relate the legend that Father Christmas is today turned out in smart red and white uniform as a courtesy of Coca-Cola's sponsorship. This gave Santa's image a facelift during the second quarter of this century. (Until this relaunch in Coca-Cola's red and white livery, Father Christmas had fallen on hard times : his appearance had become that of a bedraggled wizard).

Intriguingly there is still a lot to learn as to how some brands capture the global imagination and others do not. Every time you come across a globally famous reputation, it is worth asking yourself : do I really know how it came to be like this? For example : how did Manchester United become so famous around the world whilst some other English football clubs with comparable records have only local pockets of affinity or recognition? Was it that many of Manchester United's successes coincided with the Swinging Sixties to the extent of becoming a symbolic association of the era? Was it to do with the legends associated with Busbee's babes including those of tragic heroism when most of Manchester United's team died in an air crash? Was it that the club has always had an ebullient mix of a strong team plus some especially colourful stars? (The Charltons', Best's , Giggs' and Cantona's of this world). How much of all this did the club promote? Of course, not all of these clues could ever be transferred to any other branding situation, but many of them can.

Do you know whether your brand owns any magic moments in local consumer histories? For example, has it inherited any peculiar founder's rights as a market pioneer? Lux is an example of a brand which not only introduced the world to glamour in a soap bar but was in many developing countries consumers' first affordable access to branded glamour of any kind. So in Lux's world of beauty what kind of brand essence works best for Unilever? A first kind which scripts the brand as being soap and neighbouring categories? Or a second kind which sees the brand's relationships as able to evolve through a broader range of cosmetics provided they are about introducing consumers to life's simple luxuries at affordable prices? As we have previously pointed out, Unilever's historically soap-confining view of Lux may mean that the brand has largely had its day in the USA and Western Europe, but the business opportunity of building the Lux Company out of relationships of the second kind is potentially one of the branding world's most exciting platforms in emerging high-growth economies such as Japan, South East Asia, Eastern Europe and China.

Some companies just do not seem to have realised the magic that can be associated with a brand which happens to have been at the right place at the right time. Take Bass for example. Bass is probably the only brand to have sat for an impressionist painter - and what a painting Renoir's barlady at the Folie Bergeres turns out to be. This would seem to be a great brand "seeding" opportunity. Admittedly, Bass has only truly visioned its business as international in the last decade since its acquisition of the Holiday Inns hotel chain. So let us leave aside any debate as to whether there might previously have been an opportunity to internationalise the Bass brand in a parallel way to that which Guinness has with its globally visible ales. An item for Bass's current agenda is : why not create within Holiday Inns a Renoir (or Folie) Brasserie Format -replete with the kind of French food that is washed down best by ales, using Folie Bergere-style memorabilia with the Renoir print as centre-piece, and offering commemoratively branded lines of Bass? Would a format with unique elements of this sort provide a powerful seeding platform for establishing Bass as a worldwide brewer?

Two questions contribute to a debate of the above proposition:

·Are there historic precedents of brands which have succeeded in trading off a double image crafted for 1) home based and 2) international consumption?

·Is the "seeding" of brand fashions a successful investment strategy?

Going for "Glocal" Organisation

Many brands have used the power that is granted to a globalising business to exchange values between different cultures. For example, in the evolution of Sony, the company took great pride in introducing to Japan interesting Western customs. Whether it was for newsworthy impact associated with Sony's image or sheer exotic delight, Akio Morita's biography clarifies that he wanted Sony's first building in Tokyo to be different from any other and thus chose that the building's plaza would feature a French restaurant - a cuisine that had not previously been available in Japan but which he rightly foresaw as having a lot of fashionable potential.

Inside Japan, Sony consciously developed quite a reputation for being one of the first gateway companies to the rest of the world, just as outside Japan Sony set out to develop a pioneering standard bearer for the quality of Japanese products. As other Japanese corporate brands have become masters of this craft, they have created a visionary terminology - eg being a global citizen or a "glocal" insider - to highlight what cultural values an organisation should nurture in striving to serve the best of both world's : global leadership knowhow and locally sensitive customisation.

Brand Seeding

The strategy of brand seeding focuses on refraining from mass market expense until the essence of a great brand has been planted. Our research suggests that "Brand Seeding" is one of the strategic marketer's best kept secrets, and Brand Benchmarking (ThinkPiece 1) on Haagen-Dazs provides ideas for those who want to develop a global brand without risking the high advertising costs that are classically associated with launching a brand.

Typically, a valuable seeding opportunity may stem from : the reputation of a thriving and fashionable business in some foreign country; high quality products which become talking points when sampled amongst opinion leaders; legends of magic moments associated with the brand; mechanisms for strong PR and visibility. Table 2 adds some lessons from Brand Seeding across national markets. This serves to illustrate how seeding sets about transferring market histories to the cumulative benefit of the brand.

Table 2 : Some lessons from implementing brand seeding across countries Key elements of seeding mix include: premium product and pricing, strong design, PR, word of mouth, visibility in fashionable places Roll out criteria include: Go from one success to another, ie do not necessarily go to the biggest market or channel first Do not use mass marketing techniques until your exclusive image is thoroughly planted, eg mass advertising can kill off a seeding strategy if it is executed before the brand's cachet is firmly in its opinion leaders' minds All opinion-leading audiences - eg journalists, business partners, prestige retailers, consumer opinion leaders - can be seeded in parallel Diffusion (ie transfer) tactics can be aimed within a group, from one group to another, across cities/countries (eg jetsetters-word-of-mouth), across distribution channels Tricky addendum:Some seeded brands form a mixed range of product lines including flagships that are never intended to be profitable because they are made as limited editions or specifically placed in high visibility arena where the distributor charges the brander for the privilege. In this case, the brand team (including marketing and financial personnel in particular) must be absolutely clear as to which product lines are image-making flagships and which are to be best sellers. And corresponding performance criteria and measurements require subtly different monitoring instruments.

Whilst we are advocating orchestration of brand seeding as a conscious option for strategic marketers, it is interesting to note that the origins of many famous brands were seeded in the past by accident as well as design. These include : Coca-Cola (the drink of the smart set in turn-of-the century drug stores- the American equivalent of Parisian cafe society); Dunhill (the leather goods attire of early car drivers); Del Monte (produce originally associated with a famous hotel); many of today's "haute-couture" brands. The marketing analogy with Aladdin is irresistible : marketing geniuses now search for old brands, symbols or commercially magic properties which can play the lead role in fashioning brand new presentations.

In an emerging area of smart multimedia channels, we believe that seeding knowhow will become increasingly important in developing new brands and revitalising old brand essences.

5) The first global language

Global brands aim to pre-empt association with "big idea" identifiers as their own universal property rights. For example, if an international competitor to Marlboro tried to advertise cowboy imagery for its cigarettes, the chance of profiting from this would be remote (because even without any legal redress from Marlboro's owner) the two most likely consumer outcomes would be:

·many would misread such advertising as being for Marlboro

·many others would see no point in choosing an imitator instead of the real thing

A cultural stereotype such as Americana appears can also work to the pooled benefit of a group of brand leaders - Marlboro, Levi's, Disney, Coca-Cola, etc - each with distinctive competitive domains but American theming in common. A symbiosis results. The more famous these brands become, the more they become leading reminders of why the American way of life is appealing to a global public.

We advocate that brand teams need an increasingly high literacy rate in reading branding's glocal (global and local) language. It is not just a case of being able to read what stereotype codes are embedded through the market histories of your brand and those of your traditional competitors. These days it is necessary to have coding antennae attuned to attack scenarios that might come from any kind of territory:

·from ostensibly different products as Virgin airlines invasion of cola and other drinks markets illustrates

·from different geographic territories, eg the globalising brand

·from a different zone of history, the seeded brand. Eg Haagen-Daz's long established heritage in the US has been a pivotal component of its recent global scripting.

Whether national governments like it or not, two trojan horses of our emerging era of global networking are joining to form humankind's first global language : brands (whose unique essences reserve their own memory traces) and computerised icons (which are making human communications more symbolic and less verbal). Both of these systems of thinking work to draw on (and deposit in) a global reservoir of accessible cultural stereotypes and symbolic forms. In multimedia's global highways, these communications phenomena will be an integral part of the way that global society learns, as well as keys to the commercial influence that branded organisations will exert.

6) The time to perfect and the time to market

The brand organisation needs to make these time zones coalesce but pay each the distinctive organisational respect which is its due. Leading brands are unique business systems. Often they represent a long learning curve. Quality product formulas, vibrant staff cultures, efficient supply and delivery systems, knowhow networks and partnerships, overall reputation and track record take years to build. Often, a leading brand emanates from a core format or a winning element which took years to refine. Ask yourself how often the actual development process of a strong brand follows this three stage pattern of evolution:

1) winning element is cultivated as core component of an improved consumer benefit

2) integrated system is refined for commercial viability

3) competitively efficient format is replicated in mass way, and at this stage amplified by mass market branding

Strong brands do sometimes appear to have come from nowhere, but this is often because stage 3 is both the visible and fast moving one. In contrast, the foundation stages are often painstakingly slow to perfect.

How old do you think McDonald's is? The business was actually born in 1937 when two hard working brothers opened a hamburger restaurant in California. Another site was opened in 1939, but after that a total of 17 years was spent on stage 1 by the McDonalds as they perfected how an outlet could serve food fast and economically to a maximum number of customers.

Stage 2 of McDonald's began when Ray Kroc entered the scene in 1954. At the time, he was a fifty-two year old milkshake-mixer salesman who had visited the McDonald's in California to understand how they could possibly need eight of his machines at a single site. Ray was amazed at what he saw - fast food being served through a process of world class efficiency - and being operated only at the two McDonald's sites. Ray watched this spectacle for two days before approaching the brothers with an offer to franchise their concept.

Stage 3 involved a local and a global branding episode. It had taken Ray seven years to licence America's first two hundred McDonald's franchises. But along this learning path, Ray's special genius created the family values of McDonald's that made the restaurant so consistently welcoming across the USA. So if you were a family with children needing personal refuelling on a highway miles from home - you knew that McDonald's would be a safe haven for you. As the pioneer of this meaning for fast food, would-be American franchisees were now lining up to join McDonald's. Mass market advertising budgets rapidly increased both to pre-empt the family image and to transform it into the brand's leadership essence. A core purpose was to ensure that franchisees were proud of both their service role and their contribution to the history of the marketplace.

Brand expansion then progressed to a worldwide race to lead the fast food business with the McDonald's branding franchise across the world. By 1990, the prize for being the fastest on the accelerator to this global market could be recorded in terms of McDonald's daily customer base of 23 million people.

A lesson appears to be that once evolution of a winning business system is fully proven, the painstaking stages of development can turn into a hectic race to global markets. Once you have innovated the world's best business system, the last thing you want is for a competitor to do the replicating. Here is how Hamel & Prahalad describe the evolution of winning businesses from learning curve to lift off:

"Developing new competences and reconnoitring new competitive space can be the work of a decade or more. Yet despite the studied space of competence acquisition and market exploration, the final dash to the finishing line can be an all-out, pell-mell sprint. This is particularly likely when several competitors have been working in parallel to develop needed competences and marketing insights, and simultaneously come to believe, after a round or two of expeditionary marketing, that the market is finally ripe. This last, mad scramble to the finish line is a race to pre-empt competitors in key markets, to capture market leadership in the biggest and fastest growing national marketplaces, and bank the rewards in pioneering.

...

Managers have given much attention to the very important task of reducing product development times. Speedy product development is an important component of the capacity to preempt competitors. Yet the time interval to be minimized is not just "concept to market" but "concept to global market". A product development cycle that is 50 % shorter than a competitor's is of little benefit unless it is coupled with a strong worldwide distribution capability. Although being first to market is important, the real returns go to companies that are first to global markets".

Global races need to be scripted carefully. And branded ones are so visible that the CEO must keep on checking that local scripts are not being misinterpreted. On one occasion, even McDonald's had to take strong corrective action to keep it's image together.

At the beginning of the eighties, the Motherly McDonald's had a fleeting French affair. France's tradition of gourmet food probably did not make it seem likely to be one of the most important lead-countries in the company's European advance. so the business in Paris was licensed to a single franchisee. The McDonald's fast food concept soon proved itself to be just as welcome with busy Parisian families as other Europeans. Unfortunately, McDonald's franchisee, flushed with the success of the business, was equally tempted to choose such prime take-away sights as a shopping arcade dominated by St Lazare's pornographic movie house as he was to select respected boulevards for all the family. McDonald's had to buy back the franchise as a matter of urgency.

Strategic imperatives associated with globalisation imply revolutionary changes to the architecture of brand, strategy , and organisation (Chapters 11,12,13) that companies will need to compete in the future. Your organisation will not be able to compete in a global business world with the kinds of brands that were effective in the local business world.

Gillette provides an early example of a company which has successfully reengineered its branding architecture. The changes which Gillette made to its communications mix are chronicled in Brand Benchmarking (ThinkPiece 1) but for now let us concentrate on Gillette's strategic commitment. What Gillette did was to amalgamate all its historical goodwill which had been fragmented at local (and low value) product levels into a credible corporate architecture where everything connects through to the Essence of Gillette as "the best a man can get". Gillette now and for ever more has a serial global platform for launching all new world class products (stage 2 proven performers) at a global stroke. This ensures that no competitor can be faster than Gillette at Stage 3. Here is Hamel & Prahalad's summary appraisal of the Gillette-Sensor launch:

"After spending more than $100 million over ten years developing its revolutionary Sensor razor, and conducting an initial round of customer research, Gillette launched the product in 19 countries simultaneously. Followers, like Warner-Lambert's Schick division, were quickly buried under Gillette's worldwide promotional avalanche."

If you do not have your own access to an appropriately global banner reputation, a franchise model of global branding may be attractive. In the race to global markets, you will need partners to locally replicate your brand's indomitable spirit in the eyes of consumers everywhere. You need to write-up the system developments of stage 1 and 2 together with a branding kit that your local partners/customers round the globe find a joy to use. The fact that a franchisee is an external partner makes for good discipline. You are likely to specify the strategic controls which must operate glocally with more depth of care than you would in dealing with a local office of your own company. Examination of the franchiser's craft can provide excellent insights for the disciplines which need to be practised by any business team which finds itself involved in their organisation's stage 3 race to global market.

7) Lifestyles for Lifetimes

Hamel & Prahalad also shed more light on how purposeful corporate branding seeks to leverage the most important consumer connections between the history and the future of the business.

"The goal of the corporate umbrella brand is simple : to help customers transfer the goodwill that has been built up through positive experience with one of the company's products to other products it offers or intends to offer. Besides having a Canon copier at home, one of us also possesses two Canon 35mm cameras, a Canon 8mm camcorder, a small Canon electronic typewriter, and a Canon fax machine. There was never a decision to be a Canon home, it just worked out that way. Whenever confronted with Canon as a choice in a purchasing decision, one instinctively reflected back on the reliability, performance and value of other Canon products. Imputed with those virtues, each additional Canon purchase looked not only like a "safe" buy, but a "smart" buy. As the pace of life has continued to accelerate, and as the complexity of what people buy has accelerated exponentially, banner brands like Canon and Sony have become mnemonics, standing for quality and value, in the minds of harried, confused consumers.

8) Ritual values for revitalising consistent obsessions

Change is constant. Competitive businesses will always look for new ways to gain advantage, whereas the most basic human meanings of product categories seldom change. Take chocolate for example. Should children ever be denied access to the joy of chocolate? Should adults ever be denied access to the mood changing influence that life's least costly indulgence can offer? Of course not if you are to be a leading chocolate manufacturer who stands up for the democratic meanings of chocolate. Consequently, value for money will always be the leading success factor in the industry and its not surprising that many of the world's leading chocolate companies - Mars Hershey's and Cadbury's - have cultures that are puritanical about value for money. Note how even as distributing supermarkets have insisted on multipacks, the chocolate manufacturers were inventing bite size and pick and mix formats so that in the most hyper of supermarkets, chocolates may be picked up as branded morsels (at the lowest ticket price of any unit sold in the store).

We asked a marketing director who had two careers in marketing - the first in chocolate, the second in spirits (eg whisky) about the biggest similarities and differences in branding winners in these marketplaces:

·Biggest similarity : the data trends you need to look at to judge how strong your brand equity is

·Biggest difference : while you always need to be obsessed with a product category's critical success factors, you need to be prepared for how the focus of consistent obsessions will vary as you go from one product category to another.

For example, to succeed in chocolate bars we needed to offer unbeatable value and quality : to square the value circle we wanted to have scale to be the low cost producer in any bar we marketed and to offer the consumer the best value for money. In the case of the Mars bar it was important to offer more appetite satisfaction per penny than any other bar. Similarly, the quality obsession with the Mars bar was to look perfect and have a consistent texture - so much so that there was even a Mars bar brand manager's tooth test : bite into it and your teeth should meet exactly at the centre of the bar. Contrast that with marketing whisky brands where you are often concerned with appealing to connoisseur and fashion values. There are places where you would not want your whisky to be available and you are certainly not obsessed with the Mars bar obsession of finding every different campaign theme possible to renew the emphasis on value for money such as "the biggest Mars bar ever offered".

Rituals turn abstract customer service virtues into reasons for the staff to be proud of the brand they serve. McDonald's organises crew competitions across its franchises and the prizes for those attaining the highest customer satisfaction ratings are management training courses at Hamburger University. In another example of virtuous spiralling between customer path and staff delivery, the British Airways advertising campaigns (of the late 1980s and early 1990s) featuring the "World's Favourite Airline" and "Smiles as BA's corporate body language" justified their high advertising spends to a large part because of their motivating effects on staff culture. We would suggest this indirect effect on consumer sales was their most important purpose. It is notable that consumers appreciate the amount of organisational effort that goes into making a smile campaign work amongst every member as staff almost as much as they see through the company that advertises such a message without training staff to live up to it.

It is not only service companies that benefit from ritual celebrations. The leader's knack revolves round an insatiable appetite for searching for strong methods of bringing the whole organisation closer to customers and then taking pride to keep on improving. In particular, celebrating a valid claim to be the world's number one in something is so powerful for employees as well as consumers. The world's best is worth going an extra mile for : whether the mile is the extra effort that employees put in as part of the winning company or the distance a consumer is prepared to travel to find the best. The world's best instills pride whether you serve it as an employee or wear it as a consumer.

In a technological world, it is tempting to think of core competences in abstract terms. But in fact the continuous cultivation of almost all core competences depend on people teams building skills through intense dedication and concentrating for long periods of time on routine or systematic elements of work. Any way that branding can be deployed to transform routine into ritual is well worth considering.

Corporate values also act as signals of strategic focus and become associated with a company's right to lead. Opinion-leading audiences are impressed by an organisation like Procter & Gamble, whose purpose is guided by the mission statement of only entering markets where the firm can develop and sustain a quality difference against all competitors. See how many additions you can make to this list of the kinds of impressions that are made by such a consistent declaration in a quality improvement culture:

·P&G's selection of markets on quality criteria becomes textbook wisdom amongst commentators ranging from business journalists to academic scribes

·P&G's quality reputation amongst business students gives the firm a lead in recruiting the best

·P&G's new products tend to be given more serious attention by the trade (including the biggest supermarket multiples) than many of P&G's competitors

·P&G's employees are empowered to stand up for quality on an everyday decision basis within the firm

We would give particular emphasis to three reasons why a brand's values have a vital influence on the consistency of leadership within an organisation:

·Provided the brand values are aligned to critical success factors, they anchor the focus of the brand on the fundamental determinants of quality and value that are most relevant to consumers

·They reinforce the employees' sense of mission and pride in fulfilment; and when allied to rituals they go beyond the routine to the nobler kind of craft associated with dedicated customer service

·They empower - ie they provide an employee with the best defence against transient

decisions being made somewhere up the hierarchy - in P&G there is a communally felt right of appeal as : "is this a Procter kind of way of behaving?"

Summary

We have explored eight intriguing nuances of brand heritage and friendship:

Primarily form the consumer viewpoint

1) Heritage Beliefs

2) Making Friends

Multi-audience perspectives

3) Extraordinary Recognition

4) Action Replays

5) The first global language

Primarily from the company (employee) viewpoint

6) The time to perfect and the time to market

Primarily in relation to the service/leadership guarantees between consumer and company

7) Lifestyles for Lifetimes

8) Ritual values for consistent obsessions

In the process, we have noted that various models of global branding rely on editing the future of a brand's history in strategically astute ways. The following models and processes of organising round global brands have been introduced:

·"Glocal" brand process

·Brand Seeding

·Brand Franchising

·Brand Reengineering

·Banner/Corporate Branding