Who's brand is it anyway?

Pity poor Howard Schultz. With imagination, skill and hard work he builds one of the great new brands of recent years – worth $3.3 billion as a brand Starbucks is one of the most valuable 100 brands in the world according to Interbrand. And yet when he tries to change the logo on his brand all he gets is grief.

As one user says on the website "Who's the bonehead in your marketing department that removed the world-famous name of Starbucks Coffee from your new logo? This gold card user isn't impressed!"

And he isn’t the first to get into trouble. Gap recently had the embarrassment of proposing a changed logo and then having to change their minds. And Tropicana had similar consumer backlash to a pack change. And who can forget New Coke.

Tropicana responded to the criticisms and reversed the change because as Neil Campbell, president of Tropicana North America, said they came from some of “our most loyal consumers.”

The fact is Howard Schultz doesn’t own the Starbucks brand any more. He may own the trade mark but the brand’s consumers believe it belongs to them and you do something they don’t like at your peril.

As Schumpeter says in the Economist ‘Much of the rage in the blogosphere is driven by a sense that “they” (the corporate stiffs) have changed something without consulting “us” (the people who really matter). This ... reflects the sense that brands belong to everyone, not just to the corporations that nominally control them.’

Smart companies make use of this. Take for example the tendency for consumers to give their favourite brands nicknames. Smart companies go with the flow and adopt the names themselves. For example take Disney, Coke , Pepsi, Mini, FedEx, Bud, and Stoli.

But it is hard.

I worked on Campbell’s Soup. This is a well loved brand that occupies a space in people’s minds that Ries and Trout would be proud of. It is what love give to your children to show you love and care, particularly when they are ill. Deep archetypal analysis gave its essence as Mother’s Loving Touch.

The most popular ad amongst consumers was one called Foster Child. In this commercial a child is brought to a new foster home and is unhappy and ill until his new foster mom brings him Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. The boy says “my mom used to give me this.” The foster mom replies “So did mine.” Cue tears all round. But it did nothing for sales. It reinforced what people already knew.

To get more sales we either had to make more kids sick or find a different role for the brand as an everyday healthy meal. We did ads that presented a modern view of the family with messages about low fat and servings of vegetables. These ads did drive sales. We won a Cassies award to prove it.

Most were very popular with consumers, but one got complaints. We called it Yummy Mummy. In it a kid says to his friend “Your mom’s hot”. The friend replies “You’re so dead.” Innocuous enough but it drew the wrath of quite a few loyal users, who felt it didn’t portray the right family values. Interestingly they didn’t complain to Advertising Standards Canada. They complained to Campbells. I read this to say they weren’t offended in a broad sense. They just didn’t think their brand should act in this way. Campbells took their concerns seriously and stopped running the ad – we had plenty of others in the campaign they loved.

But the lesson is clear you don’t own the brand any more. Its users have a major stake as well.

It can be OK to move it in new directions. We did so with Campbell’s and we did with another brand I worked on. Tetley Bitter is a British icon of a beer, but in the 80s was suffering as lagers were growing. We created advertising that took the brand in a new direction and appealled to young people – the big beer drinkers. We also tested it with loyal older drinkers. They didn’t like the ads but I’ll never forget what they said. They were glad we were doing it because it was keeping their brand alive and introducing it to a new generation of drinkers who could then come to enjoy the wonderful product as much as them.

So you can change things, but only with the consumer’s permission.

There is no such thing as a new idea?

Separated at Birth

 

Pedigree?



  

Birds?



I saw a great commercial recently. It’s for Pedigree Dog Food and was done in Canada by TBWA. Essentially it shows dogs in very slow motion jumping in the air catching kibble. OK so it’s been around for a while but I’m slow. I loved it, though did worry about the level of branding – it could have been for any dog food.

But then I came across a music video called Birds, made by Pleix for a band called Vitalic. It too shows dogs “flying” through the air in super slow motion. It was made in 2006, clearly before the Pedigree ad. It is remarkably similar. It seems Pedigree has a twin.

Assuming the creators of the Pedigree ad had seen the Birds film, my first thought was what a rip off. I felt somehow cheated. It wasn’t as original as I had thought. And indeed it isn’t.

But then I thought some more about it.

First there is a great history of advertising taking ideas from art and repurposing them for commercial gain. John Everett Millais’s painting “Bubbles" was used by Pears Soap way back in the 19th Century. Budweiser’s "Whassup" was based on a short film entitled "True" by Charles Stone III. Even Ridley Scott’s "1984" for Apple owes a lot to his earlier Blade Runner.

So it doesn’t necessarily matter that they have used an existing idea. After all it wasn’t another client’s campaign they were using as inspiration. As many others have said “There is no such thing as a new idea".

The psychologist Brown said in "Social Psychology" in 1965

“So good an idea is never invented. The antecedents of the authors we have discussed have also their antecedents, and in the end, we find, the idea seems always to have existed. What has changed is the precision of its statement and the implications which are developed” p604. (Quoted in The Accidental Statistician.)



What’s more the creative team have taken the idea and given it a new meaning. In the original the dogs were flying to the music, with no particular reason given. In the Pedigree they have chosen to take off because they love the food so much they want to catch it in their mouths.

So overall I don’t feel so bad. A little disappointed maybe, but still a great ad (though my branding concerns are reinforced now I know it was designed for a different purpose originally).

I also hope that they gave credit to the originators – maybe they used them to make the ad. I hope so. Pears, Budweiser and Apple did.

If you know let me know.