Brand turnarounds

When Toyota released the first mass-produced, mid-engine sports car to come from a Japanese manufacturer – the new MR2 – sales were inexplicably much lower in France than anticipated. A red-faced marketing team at Toyota was left to shuffle into the boardroom and announce that, perhaps, it had something to do with the phonetic sound of the ‘em air deux’ and its similarity to a well-known French expletive. The logo and name were swiftly changed, in the end to Coupe MR, but damage to the parent brand had been done.

Marketing moguls are united in championing the importance of brand-management and maintaining brand value. It’s a murky world crammed with jargon and debatable strategic approaches, but at its heart is the reality that brand means everything in today’s business world. It might seem like an elusive quality that can’t be defined, but successfully identifying and managing your brand is not just a bonus, it can be a lifesaver. If you can manipulate it to your advantage when you need it most – when trouble is not just knocking at the door, but has made itself a cup of tea and taken a seat at your table – your brand could save your company from going under.
Kevin Roberts, CEO of multinational ‘ideas company’ Saatchi and Saatchi Worldwide, coined the term ‘Lovemark’ to describe a super-evolved brand that emotionally connects with its audience and creates ‘loyalty beyond reason’. Though this might be over-egging the pudding a little, it illustrates the point that identification and emotional response are key achievements of a successful brand, and from it an allegiance or loyalty is formed. That loyalty is like gold dust – get it and customers will stick with your company through thick and thin.

Good times and bad
Brand loyalty does not merely stem from a well-designed, attractive logo. Responses to advertising and marketing strategies can, and often do, create a set of perceived values in consumers’ minds about a company or product.
‘To all intents and purposes, a company’s corporate brand and reputation is one and the same thing. If anything, a brand is seen as something more tangible,’ explains Jane Piper, independent brand consultant at Jane Piper Brand Strategy Consultancy and author of an overview on brand value for Superbrands.

Stuart Rose of M&S

Take the example of M&S, a company that has recently turned around a certain amount of consumer apathy towards its core clothing lines, which had resulted in sales figures plummeting. Stuart Rose took over as CEO and set about making his mark, dropping the Marks & Spencer logo and using the commonly used M&S instead – Marks & Sparks would have been a step too far, perhaps. The success of the ad campaign sporting the slogan ‘What’s your M&S?’ for clothing and ‘This isn’t just food, this is M&S food’ has led to sales fluttering back up again – the chocolate pudding featured on the television advert reportedly produced a 3,000-per-cent increase in sales for the line.

M&S turned things around by reminding consumers of the strong core values that it had built up in the past, drawing on tradition and the notion that it is a national store – a chain that belongs to its customers. In fact, the brand update has been so successful that M&S is now considering a redesign of all of its stores, to be called ‘Your M&S’ if the decision is approved.

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