What's In A Name?

A powerful and iconic global brand name is one of the best equities a company has going for them…right?

Well not exactly.

In today’s ever-changing world where brands and companies are routinely bought, sold and merged, what happens to a business – once part of one of the most famous brands in the world – when it is sold into the world or private equity as it tries to re-invent itself under a new brand name?

How do customers respond?

And more importantly, how do the employees of that business respond when they suddenly find they are no longer part of an iconic brand, but now part of a start-up business with a new identity and a famous past.

You say this doesn’t happen. Well it does. Read on.

Before I dive into the story, let me give you some background flavor. Let’s go back to the late 1990s. I was part of the marketing and branding team for Burmah Castrol working in their Americas lubricants business on well-known motor oil brands like Castrol GTX and Castrol Syntec.

One day I came to the office to learn that our 99 year old company had been sold to another globally famous company – British Petroleum. What would become of the Castrol name I thought? Would Castrol GTX now be known as BP GTX. Well the answer was no – although we did give it a lot of thought (but that’s another story!)

The Castrol name would continue to live on as the flagship brand for BP lubricants globally. So to consumers and customers it was still Castrol GTX, but what about to legacy Castrol employees? They still fancied themselves as working for Castrol and seemingly had little desire to embrace the BP name, heritage or culture. Over time (2-3 years to be exact) that eventually did change, particularly when the Castrol name was replaced by the BP logo on the outside of the building and on their paychecks.

That was then…so lets fast forward about ten years.

An iconic American company famous for imagination and bright ideas – let’s call them ED for this story – sells off a small piece of its business to an investment group. The business has been very successful and has been in the market for over 50 years and is well entrenched as a global technology leader in the industry.

The investment group changes the name of the company to INNOVATE (not the real name) and continues to position itself as global leader with a legacy of innovation and market “firsts” – with subtle ties to its heritage as an ED company.

It was right about this time that INNOVATE hired me to help drive their brand awareness around the world externally to customers and internally to employees. In the first few weeks on the job, I could see that INNOVATE had done a good job rebranding themselves with marketing collateral, on the web and across most internal and external touchpoints. This looks pretty good, I said to myself. They have a good brand positioning in place. Maybe I just need to sharpen and push this positioning externally and we’ll be in the right place.

Now that I was feeling good about the external communications, I figured I should do an audit of how the new brand message had been pushed out internally to employees. In the past, I had luck with internal surveys – they had always provided good insights on the strength on how employees spoke to the brand. So I decided to poll employees of INNOVATE to see what they thought their brand stood for.

“Please complete the following sentence for me,” was my first survey question. “INNOVATE, a global industry leader, is positioned as blank?” Clearly I expected most to 'fill in the blank' with something connected to the brand positioning that had been put in place.

“…formally part of ED,” was the first answer.

“I just tell customers we used to be with ED,” was the second response.

“Just sold off by ED and rebranded under a new name,” was the third.

On this went as I polled over 50 people from all functions and regions of the organization. At the end, I could count on one hand the number of people who provided a response not like the first three.

So here was a new organization, that had spent time and dollars to rebrand themselves, they had used resources to develop new materials to communicate externally to customers that their name had changed, but they had neglected to drive awareness among their most important audience – their own employees.

In the end, it is critically important for your employees to wear their brand on their sleeves. They are the best brand ambassadors and advertisers a company has – especially in B2B markets which INNOVATE was part of. They are the ones talking to and conducting business with your customers all day.

When your own employees believe in your brand and can communicate its story and the value the company delivers, it makes BrandSense.

When they are not on board, they are left to make up their own story, or gravitate to what is familiar, or easy. Everyone knew what ED stood for – it was comfortable and well known. Like saying I play baseball for the New York Yankees. But no one knew anything about INNOVATE because it was new, unknown and unfamiliar. So when your own employees can’t say what their company stands for – your brand message is compromised.

And that makes Brand NonSense.

UMPOD

Early in my career Jerry, the marketing director at my company, came to me and said we need to develop a UMPOD for an upcoming new product launch.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll get right on it.”

There was only one problem. I had no idea what Jerry was talking about.

UMPOD…what exactly was that? I had never heard the term before. Since this was in the early 90’s I couldn’t Google it nor could I relate it to some new product extension of on iPod because they were still 6-7 years away from hitting the market for the first time.

So with nowhere to turn I just decide to forge ahead as best I could. But I didn’t give up trying to figure out what this UMPOD thing was. Over the next few days I tried to slip the UMPOD reference into discussions with my marketing counterparts to see what they could tell me.

“You know,” I said to one of our brand managers, “Jerry has asked me to develop copy for a new UMPOD. I really have some good ideas and I can’t wait to get started.”

“Yeah, he really likes those UMPODs,” was the response.

As the day went on I received similar responses from others on the marketing team to my UMPOD references. This was getting me nowhere.

Stay calm I said to tell myself. I could sense clouds of doubt starting to creep towards me. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t going to be able to figure out this UMPOD thing, but perhaps I could develop a different approach for Jerry. I knew he wanted this for that new product launch and I knew the product had a newer, patented technology that comparable products didn’t have. Why don’t I start by writing about that? And I also remembered that we had just finished some field testing on this product and we had data that showed how it outperformed competitive products. I just needed to find that data to see what products it had tested against.

I found the results from the field testing and it confirmed that our new product would have some points of difference when it hit the market. So I put my copywriting hat on and started to formulate some good sell copy that would promote that distinction and establish a good value proposition for the product that could be integrated into all collateral and advertising touch points.

So maybe I hadn’t cracked the case of the UMPOD, but I at least felt good that I had developed a good value proposition story for the launch that called out some good points of difference. In lieu of that UMPOD, I at least had something to give to Jerry.

Since we were still a few years away from email correspondence, I walked to Jerry’s corner office the next day and handed him a copy of what I had developed.

He took my offering in his hand and swiveled his chair around to face towards the window as he began to read it. I had written about a page, but it seemed to take forever for him to get through it. This didn’t feel good, I thought. I looked towards his office door and wondered if I could bolt through it before he turned his chair back towards me. I don’t’ know...it was about nine to ten feet away. If only it was casual Friday and I had my running shoes on…

As I continued to contemplate my next move, Jerry spun back towards me and flicked the paper on top of this desk.

Always a fast thinker, the word “Sooo” came out of my mouth half spoken as a statement and half as a question.

Jerry paused. Then he spoke.

I was looking to get a good UMPOD out of you. But instead I get this?

“Jerry, uh…let me …,” I started to mutter not knowing where I was going.

“This is not good,” he interrupted, “it’s …actually…one of the best UMPODs I ever seen. You know, I see so many brands out there without a good one it’s just unbelievable. Why anyone would launch a product without one, well that’s just Brand NonSense. Good job.”


...oh by the way...if you haven't yet figured out what UMPOD stands for, its 'Unique and Meaningful Point of Difference.' And its something every product or service should have to differentiate it from competitors. And as Jerry said some years ago...if you don't have one--its Brand NonSense.

I'm Baaack

Ok, so its been a while…4 years to be exact…but I just wanted to make sure that this blogging thing wasn’t just some passing fade before I made a full time commitment to it. But now I’m back and in the coming days / weeks will be adding some new reflections on the word of brands and the things marketers do to enhance them…and tear them done.

The latter, of course makes no sense, which is why this site it called Brand NonSense.