As your business and the market changes, so should your brand. But should the design strategy be subtle or significant, evolutionary or revolutionary?
By Michel Nugawela
It’s
not uncommon to find major homegrown brands in Sri Lanka either
undernourished or underexploited but after a period of neglect, they
need to be reexamined and refreshed from the ground up.
When brands need to change – and evolving styles, trends, technologies,
business models and new product offers eventually push all brands to
change –design plays a key role if and when it is linked to a strategy that
consolidates or increases share in existing markets, or advances the
brand into new segments and categories. But when, how and to what extent
are we talking about?
In any transition from as-is to should-be, there are two degrees of
change for marketers to consider. In the first approach – what we refer
to as an evolutionary strategy – brands keep pace with shifts in the
market, but do so within a context that consumers clearly recognize.
However, when a revolutionary strategy is required, every aspect of the
brand is up for scrutiny and possible positional change.
When done right, giving new vitality to a brand – be it evolutionary or
revolutionary – can successfully differentiate it, modernize it, signal a
new direction to the market, or shift consumer perception in a positive
way.
Evolutionary strategy
Evolutionary design, as the word implies, is made up of smaller
incremental changes that do not fundamentally alter the character of a
brand. These changes can range from functional to cosmetic, subtle to
significant, but the overall message is one of continuity. In insets 1
and 2, I have shown two before-and-after examples of evolutionary
design: while the degree of change varies (Mabroc’s shift is subtle
while Aitken Spence’s is significant) there was no repositioning of
either brand, based on a shift in business direction or a new product or
service offering.
Over the years, Aitken Spence had seen its identity splinter, as
disparate logos and names were used by different business sectors and
individual companies – a frequent outgrowth of organically evolving
businesses. The new Aitken Spence logo and master brand strategy is
highly efficient: it maximizes awareness by focusing on a single brand
image, enabling growth today and building elasticity that can drive
expansion tomorrow.
Businesses that compete in different geographical markets also make
widespread use of evolutionary design – the newly refreshed Mabroc logo
bears a striking resemblance to its predecessor by retaining the shapes,
symbols and colours that have driven consumer familiarity and
recognition in the CIS and East European markets. Take that away and
customers and consumers (who were also not conversant in English) would
have had a hard time recognizing the brand and sales could have been
impacted – perhaps drastically.
An evolutionary design response is also important to consider when
consumers don’t make weighty decisions on low-involvement routine buys
(soft drinks, biscuits, and tea, for example) and settle into habitual
purchases. When consumers select a brand because it is familiar – what
we more commonly refer to as a “comfort zone” – they are reassured that
the product will deliver the same taste, flavour and experience that
they have come to habitually rely upon. Here, radical repositionings (or
revolutionary design responses with the brand suddenly appearing in a
new and unrecognizable form) disrupt their habitual buying behaviour and
reactivate the consumers’ purchase decision mechanism – a dangerous
situation that can lead to reassessment and exploration of alternative
competitor offers. In inset 3, I have demonstrated another example of an
evolutionary design response – in this case, Elephant House’s carefully
managed transition to its new contoured bottle – which successfully
addressed consumer familiarity while concurrently evolving the brand to a
more contemporary position. At focus group discussions, the migration
achieved a 100 percent approval rating with consumers perceiving and
personifying the old-to-new shift in evolutionary language that in
itself is highly revealing – from “grandfather to grandson” and “mother
to daughter”.
Revolutionary strategy
Revolutionary design requires more time and cost investment, and is
usually the approach when companies are trying to reach new audiences or
signal a change in their brand or business strategy. Revolutionary
design overthrows the old order and introduces new ways of perceiving
and engaging with brands – either through extensions aimed at radically
new segments that advance the brand into new high-growth categories and
markets, or through mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs or reorganizations.
In such cases, it becomes necessary to shift and build new customer and
consumer perceptions about brands – through new products, services,
capabilities, and long-term growth prospects.
When Hayleys wanted to signal its new position to the market following
the acquisition of Mabroc Teas and a reorganization to its portfolio
(which included Kelani Valley Plantations and Talawakelle Tea Estates),
global market research revealed the rapid growth of fruit & herbal
and health & wellness teas in value sales, pointing the way to a
master brand logo that broadened market perceptions of the Mabroc brand
and its offering through the combined capabilities of its sister
companies.
A second example, shown in inset 4, is the decision by Carson
Cumberbatch’s oil palm business – Goodhope PLC – to diversify beyond its
traditional focus on plantations to encompass the total product
lifecycle from growing to refining, merchandising, and distributing palm
oil. This once again required a revolutionary design approach through a
positioning strategy that defined the value proposition of the business
as it integrated vertically, as well as a new logo and global brand
architecture strategy to communicate the link between the parent company
and its new acquired businesses moving forward.
As I mentioned earlier, revolutionary design also becomes necessary as a
company matures and needs to penetrate and appeal to new (and usually
younger) consumer segments. Here, Elephant House’s corporate rebranding
strategically repositioned the brand to support its investments in, and
adaptations to, a product mix that was better geared to meet more
current demands – especially in the higher-margin impulse segment
targeted at younger consumers. Managing any brand revitalization means
staying true to existing consumers (after all, intentionally alienating
your core market isn’t exactly a shrewd business strategy) while also
marketing to the more youthful demographic that fuels the future growth
of the brand. Shown in inset 5, Elephant House’s master brand strategy
strongly brought back the Elephant House name into the identity while
relegating the old (but much revered) elephant icon to the role of the
Ceylon Cold Stores parent endorser.
Finally, a revolutionary approach is also most typically associated with
a catastrophic event or customer crisis for a brand – such as Golden
Key – at which point even changing the name may be on the cards. Brands
that fall into this category are unwise to stay the course with their
tarnished names and identities: they will always run at sub-optimal
performance with more customers staying away (out of sheer fear) than
patronizing their services.
Which way to go, what degree of change?
When a brand is properly revitalized – through consumer and market
research, as well as a strategy and positioning that builds a compelling
point of difference which in turn justifies a price premium – an
updated and strategically relevant logo or identity becomes a rallying
point to customers and consumers. With an evolutionary approach, it can
signal a fresher way of perceiving an existing brand or entirely new
offering as the business evolves organically to own new ground, or,
through a revolutionary approach, herald radical shifts based on
newly-acquired capabilities and market dynamics.
(The writer is one of Sri
Lanka’s leading brand consultants and can be contacted at:
www.michelnugawela.com /lk.linkedin.com/in/ michelnugawela)
www.dailymirror.lk
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