2009: A year in review - and our predictions for 2010

2009 was a challenging year for marketers. This time last year we were talking about the collapse of Woolworth's and still recovering from the shock of Lehman Bros; the banking crisis was in full swing and we were surrounded by fear and uncertainty.

Fortunately, we seem to have been spared the worst fears of the naysayers. Whether this is because of, or despite, government intervention divides opinion and we will all get our chance to record our point of view in 2010.

In a tough and uncertain climate, marketers were called on to perform in a way that we haven't been for some time. The pressure for short-term, measurable results financed with slender budgets overpowered any sense of long-term planning and brand building. We rushed head-long into social media, not I suspect, because we knew how it would work, but because it was trendy and cheap.

In the office, we had to improve relationships with sales and finance to ensure stakeholder buy-in and a seamless progression from concept through to delivery: it is bizarre to think it might ever have been any other way.

Unfortunately, little progress has been made with improving marketers' sense of self worth. The hand wringing continues, with many marketers bemoaning their lack of influence at senior levels within their organisations, yet seemingly unable to devise a strategy to put it right.

On a more positive note, the summer months saw The Marketing Eye engaged in the debate about marketing automation. Led by the US, this still has some way to go in the UK, but it is encouraging to see people trying to harness technology to support sound marketing principles.

Our involvement came about via this blog, which has proved popular in many countries and has a particularly strong following in the US. The appetite for new content in the US appears insatiable. Our post on the differences between B2B and B2C marketing still attracts more than 100 readers a month and a plethora of comments.

The year saw fewer than normal corporate re-brands, but the controversy they created was no less heated. AOL, Kraft and MSN where amongst those that offered us evolved identities. Starbucks sent bloggers into a spin with their experiment with un-branded coffee shops in Seattle.

The big story of 2009 was, however, the explosion of Twitter, which came of age with the revolution in Iran. Twitter is still growing and is now finding its natural level. We have still to see the first Twitter-born brand, but the growth in the personal brands of people like Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher suggests the potential is there. Compare the Market is the best example we have seen in the UK so far of Twitter being incorporated into a broader marketing strategy, building the personality of the brand via the incomparable meerkat, Aleksandr Orlov.

As a business, The Marketing Eye has come of age too. We have new people, new offices, and a recently appointed Chairman designate who will help steer the business towards its full potential. We are firmly set on a road to growth and the final few weeks of 2009 were spent immersed in strategy and operating models. Our goal is to grow the business four-fold by 2012, which we will achieve by hiring the best marketing people and staying true to our philosophy of 'every client is our only client'.

So what will 2010 hold for us? As a business, we will take on more staff, enter new markets and strengthen our internal processes so that we can continue to put customers first. For the world of marketing, our crystal ball reveals the following:

• Twitter will continue to grow globally: its value for search and news will be realised. Marketers will still struggle to harness it for commercial purposes - but will keep on trying


• The shift towards spending on digital marketing vs. off-line will increase, probably because it is cheaper, not because it is proven to be better


• There will be some renewed growth in branding. Businesses that have neglected their brands over the past couple of years will now be finding that a revamp of the external and internal brand is overdue. At a visual level, an updated identity will signal renewed optimism as we claw our way out of recession. The business case will still have to be made and investment will be hard won


• Marketing budgets will nudge gently upwards as we come out of recession or as businesses start to adjust to, and accept, the 'new normal'


• A change in Government seems inevitable. As a marketer, I'm interested to see how the parties make use of new and old media to win our votes. As a businessman, I want to know which is the party for business.

What were your main marketing memories of 2009 and what do you predict for 2010? We'll be interested to hear your views. Whatever your role and wherever you are, may we take this opportunity to wish you a happy and healthy 2010.

Happy New Year!

Beyond No Logo

This post is co-authored with Jo Allen, Creative Director with The Marketing Eye.

Several years have passed since ‘No Logo’, Naomi Klein’s seminal backlash against multinational corporations. In her book, Klein uncovered a betrayal of the central promises of many of the world’s most revered brands: Bill Gates became a global whipping boy, Nike's swoosh was equated with sweatshop labour and McDonald's arches turned into a synonym for childhood obesity. Little wonder that these brands found themselves on the wrong end of a can of spray paint.

Since ‘No Logo’ we have seen some seismic shifts. The world’s most valuable brand, Coca Cola, recently acquired a stake in Innocent Drinks, in part, because of the positive light Innocent would reflect back onto the corporate brand. We have also seen Coca Cola focus on healthier drinks with the launch of Diet Coke Plus and Coke Zero.

We see a similar situation at McDonald’s, which has been addressing the healthy eating issues that have dogged it in the past. Starbucks too is looking at how it can realign its proposition with the needs of a more informed and discerning audience.

Business direction is now being moulded by brand strategies dictated by customer values not business values. The information age means there is no place to hide any actions, policies or values that run contrary to the core values of the consumer. Audiences are sophisticated and informed. They choose the brands they want a relationship with, not the other way round.

The important lesson in these case studies is that branding doesn’t have to mean greed and excess, nor, incidentally, does it have to have to be the exclusive domain of large corporations: it is only when we realise this that we can understand how important and positive it can be for a business.

Think of any well-known modern day brand and you will find an organisation behind it that has:

· A clear customer promise

· A well defined set of values

· An ‘all for one’ philosophy among the people who work there

· A strong employee proposition designed to attract and retain the best employees

· Consistent and well targeted communications that inspire

There is nothing morally wrong in any of this, on the contrary. If the honesty exists; if the values of the business are properly aligned to those of the consumer and lived and breathed at every level within the organisation, then we create powerful businesses that can be a force for good.

An unfortunate consequence of the global downturn is that businesses – particularly smaller businesses - have become more inward looking. With the focus being on short-term cost-cutting and survival, ‘the brand’ as a concept is seen by many as too intangible and too esoteric to justify time and investment. How unfortunate and what a missed opportunity.

The truth is that building a brand doesn’t necessarily require significant investment: it needs vision, commitment and structure. A brand strategy, fully embraced from the start and consistently nurtured throughout its life, can be the difference between average performance and stellar success.

To achieve all this isn’t easy, but the prize for those that go for it is a significant one.

Putting the star and bucks back in Starbucks - Starbucks trial brand strategy

Coffee is a regular topic of conversation in The Marketing Eye office. Normally it’s an argument about whose turn it is to make the next one, but now, for a short time at least, we can claim a professional interest.

Recent reports have revealed that Starbucks is planning to open 3 unbranded coffee shops in its home town of Seattle. We are told that each of the new shops will be unique and tailored to the community in which it is situated. One of the test outlets will feature poetry readings and live music and there will be alcohol on offer and free Wi-Fi. The address of the cafe will be used in the branding, for example one is to be called 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea. Most importantly, there will be no Starbucks branding.

Lambasted by the conspiracy theorists as stealth marketing, the Starbucks experiment is a fascinating case-study in brand life-cycles and brand strategy.

Globally ubiquitous, the Starbucks brand is a phenomenon. Since expanding out of Seattle in the 1990’s, it has re-defined the coffee market and become synonymous with the boom years and globalisation. The signs are, however, that Starbucks might now have reached its peak. Last year’s results showed a heavy decline on previous years and in April, Starbucks reported a further 77% fall in quarterly profits.

The reverse can’t be blamed entirely on the recession as the evidence is that, even with less money in our pockets, there is still plenty of coffee being drunk. The Starbucks star has definitely lost its sparkle. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that returning CEO Howard Schultz is looking for new ways to invigorate Starbucks' performance and return it to growth. The brand has got too big too quickly and is in need of re-invention.

Tailoring a product to the needs and wants of the market goes back to the basic principles of good marketing. The ‘one-size-fits-all’ Starbucks’ model needs modifying and evolving. People have grown tired of the homogeneous outlet and its mass produced product. As consumers, we know that a far more satisfying experience is found in the local coffee shop where a bespoke and lovingly produced beverage is mixed with a genuine appreciation of our custom. Schultz recognizes that Starbucks must present itself as a neighbourhood coffee shop instead of the corporate conglomerate that it has become.

Management Today said: “The move is interesting because it’s essentially a reaction against the kind of bland, ubiquitous corporatism with which Starbucks has become synonymous to many people. It’s basically admitting that some customers are now put off by well-known popular brands and are more inclined to favour smaller local ones instead”.

Opinion on Twitter is divided:
@karentoms said: “How cruel, I'd be gutted to find I'd been inadvertently lulled into Starbucks”, whereas, @bellakatz posted:” Interesting idea. I kinda like it”. @danielmarino summed up most people’s views with his simple: “questionable, but very interesting” comment.

The chief concern seems to be about honesty. @jeremyrandall said: “Unbranded shops feel like subterfuge. How about unique cafes/names, but keep a small Starbucks logo, so it doesn't seem like trickery?”

Starbucks will do well to heed this tweet of wisdom. Adopting and implementing a local marketing strategy under the umbrella brand would be seen as a much more open approach.

As we have said in previous posts, there is no reason why a business shouldn’t operate two or more brands and even allow the brands to compete against each other.

A different brand for a different market is not a new concept: Toyota does it with Lexus: Donna Karen does it with DKNY and there are many more examples. The important point is that there is something different in the customer experience and the customer promise. The early evidence is that this is the intention with the new Starbucks brand, but the strategy will unfurl if it can’t be maintained. The organisation will undoubtedly want to leverage the efficiencies of its larger operation, for example in purchasing. If that also extends to recruitment and training, one wonders how different the customer experience can really be. Same coffee, same staff, same processes - will we essentially be left with only a change in decor?

To work, the change must go deep into the core values. As The Community Room posted on its blog: “Starbucks needs to whole heartedly handover its stores to the community.... How many people would love to host something in these pieces of real estate? Let customers run everything and change the emphasis, so it’s honestly about the local community”.

Starbucks will be faced with some fascinating dilemmas if the new stores out-perform the branded ones: What is the future of the corporate brand? How does it achieve economies of scale in a brand with unlimited physical iterations? How does it become welcomed and not isolated by the communities it wants to be part of?

The authors of brand and marketing text books around the world wait with bated breath.

Banking on a brand

Santander has announced that it is to rebrand all of its UK operations.

Bradford & Bingley, Abbey and Alliance & Leicester are to disappear from our High Street to be replaced by Santander, creating the prospect of 3 branches of the same bank in every major town - for the time being at least.

The driver for the change is a strategy to establish Santander as a global brand. Arguably one of the best managed banks in the world and currently 7th largest by asset size, Santander doesn’t yet have the perception of scale of an HSBC or Citibank.

To Santander, the solution is to make the brand ubiquitous. All group business will carry the Santander brand and there will be an ongoing programme of high profile sponsorships and media placements to support it.

But will this be appreciated by the customers?

As we look across the landscape of major banks in the UK, we see a variety of brand strategies in operation.

HSBC, like Santander, favours the monolithic brand approach, branding all of its businesses and marketing as HSBC.

RBS prefers to manage a portfolio of brands that includes NatWest, Coutts, Direct Line, Churchill and Lombard.

Lloyds Banking Group, like RBS, maintains a number of brands, including Cheltenham & Gloucester and recent acquisitions, Halifax and Bank of Scotland.

Barclays, on the other hand, is taking a sub-brand route with Barclays Capital, Barclays Wealth and Barclays Commercial, among others, being allowed to spin off and develop their own brand personalities.

So, why the different approaches and which one is right?

One brand applied to all businesses helps build brand recognition and is infinitely easier and less expensive to manage. There are limitations, however.

HSBC has been eminently successful in creating one of the world’s leading banking groups and its logo can be seen in all corners of the globe. The ability to adapt the brand to suit a particular target market is, though, constrained and being seen as a banking behemoth is not universally attractive. HSBC has had to invest heavily in the global ‘The world’s local bank’ campaign to show it is still in touch with its customers, whoever and wherever they are.

A monolithic brand strategy is fine in the good times, but when part of the business’ reputation comes under fire, the whole brand is affected. Never has this been more clearly demonstrated than in the current banking crisis.

The RBS brand, once hailed as the home of astute and savvy Scottish bankers, now finds itself a symbol of the meltdown of the whole financial services industry. The bank now has to hide the RBS brand under a bushel and promote the individual businesses for fear of derision if it does anything else. Fortunately, the brand strategy gives it this option.

Conventional wisdom says that if the target market, customer promise and proposition are different, then a separate brand should be used.

The multi-brand strategies operated by Lloyds Banking Group and RBS have allowed them to tailor different propositions to suit the different audiences they talk to. The cachet that the Coutts brand has to its high-net-worth clients, for example, would be lost under a re-brand to RBS Private Banking.

A multi-brand strategy also allows these banks to attack their markets on several fronts. A customer that decides against Halifax for a mortgage might still choose Cheltenham & Gloucester, be it through lack of awareness, convenience or some other perceived difference in the product, price or delivery proposition.

This then leaves the Barclays approach, which seems to be neither one thing nor the other and has all the hallmarks of an internal battle being won by certain sections of the business. We understand the breakaway started in Barclays Wealth, where the management felt their association with an everyday High Street bank was constraining their ability to win business. Rather than show the specialism with copy, image style and appropriate media choices, the bank has allowed a sub-brand to be created, which has then had to be replicated through the other divisions in the organisation. The danger of a sub-brand strategy is that, without careful management, the number of sub-brands gets out of control and the master brand becomes fragmented and diluted.

So, is Santander right to re-brand in the UK? We think not. We believe customers would have enjoyed the choice between the 3 businesses and that, in taking the route it has, Santander has given up the opportunity to position each brand for a different market. This would have given more options to consumers and created cross sales opportunities for the organisation.

We have no doubt that Santander will achieve the benefits of its scale, whether it rebrands in the UK or not. Organisations should keep in mind though that scale matters to the City, not to customers, and that analysts are more than capable of working out who owns what.

An innocent (and logical) decision

Last week we learned that Innocent Drinks has agreed to sell a 20% stake in the business to Coca-Cola for £30m.

The news has parallels with the sale of Ben & Jerry's to Unilever in 2000 and the more recent sale of Green & Black's to Cadbury. Loyal fans say the spirit of the brand will die and many say they will desert.

So, is the investment a mistake by the owners and a misjudgment by Coca-Cola? Of course not.

Innocent is an excellent case study in why a business should build a brand: it is precisely because Innocent has built such an extensive and loyal following that the owners have attracted a business the size of Coca-Cola to take a minority stake for such a huge sum.

Why else does anybody try to build a business if it is not at some point to reap the rewards? (And the rewards here are said to be a platform for further growth, not yachts for the founders). This might be anathema to the hippies to whom profit is a dirty word, but this is the real world in which somebody has to do the work and create the wealth.

Those that accuse Messrs Reed, Balon and Wright of selling out overlook the fact that Innocent had probably gone as far as it could with its existing resources. The investment has brought vast increases in marketing capability and buying power: it has also secured jobs. Innocent was facing having to make 20% of its workforce redundant in response to falling sales and can now avoid this. No doubt more jobs will be created in time. What can be more socially responsible than saving and creating jobs at a time of economic slow-down?

The question for many is whether the spirit of the brand can be maintained and, if it can't, will it have a net detrimental effect on the performance of the product.

While business values can't be manufactured, a brand personality can. A brand is an inanimate object that can be made into whatever the owner wants it to be. There is no reason why the personality of the brand can't be maintained with its quirky packaging, jolly blogs and grass liveried vehicles. This will require some careful and dedicated brand management, but it is feasible. McDonalds has achieved it with Pret-a-Manger and we should credit Coke with the intelligence to achieve it with Innocent.

The brand is likely to lose some of its cottage-industry feel, as the earlier examples have, but it will still appeal to a mass audience and the stronger control of the 5 marketing forces will make it a better and more profitable business overall.

Links

Innocent Drinks - customer comments

Porters' 5 Marketing Forces

Making brand values valuable

Brand values originated as a concept somewhere in the 1990’s when the understanding of branding evolved from being simply an exercise in corporate identity to it becoming a definition of the overall emotional experience.

Like most original thinking, however, it was not long before everybody jumped on the bandwagon and brand values became commoditised – a box ticking exercise devoid of any original thought.

I have lost count of the number of businesses I have seen that define their values as professional integrity, customer focus and team orientation, perhaps with a bit of politically correct social conscience thrown in for good measure. Frankly, if we don’t all have these values in our brands then we shouldn’t be in business in the first place.

So, if values are meant to be the foundation of a brand and the things that make it stand out from a crowd, what is the point of them if they are all the same?

Brand values have to be about more than just words. Rather than turgid mediocrity, we need to think about defining and measuring brands in terms of their emotional impact, both inside the organisation and outside it. This means:

• Attraction - the capacity of our brands to be a magnet for attention
• Energy - how our brands motivate action
• Stature - what we are respected for
• Spirit - how our brands can generate excitement and inspire.

Whether these are brand values or not, I don’t know and don’t much care. What I do know, is that this is what a brand should offer and stand for. Time spent working out how to deliver these elements will be far more rewarding than time spent looking through a thesaurus for a new word for 'integrity'.

Brands without chains

Jo and I had lunch today with Erika Uffindell, brand guru and founder of leading brand agency, Uffindellwest.

While we were speaking, I couldn't help wonder if it is possible to create and manage a brand anymore: it strikes me that we are entering a new paradigm where brands aren't defined by businesses, but by their customers.

Twitter has been thrown open to the world - and look at the results. Everywhere, people are creating applications and 'follow me' icons to turn Twitter into what they want it to be. What would have happened if it had been locked down with brand guidelines and IP protection?

David Meerman Scott talks about losing control in his World-Wide Rave - having an idea and releasing it on the basis that the rewards will come later from advocacy and followership. Perhaps it's not suited to every business, but it does seem that the organisations that are opening themselves up are the ones creating a new kind of brand awareness and loyalty, setting the stage for the next economy.

Is this a revolution or a return to basics? Listen to our customers, act with integrity, abandon manufactured values and deliver a brand that customers want: perhaps it's not rocket science after all.

Uffindelwest

David Meerman Scott - World Wide Rave

Irrational marketing for rational customers won't work

Seth Godin is a well respected blogger and talks good sense on a variety of marketing related issues. In his post on The rational marketer (and the irrational customer), however, he misses an important point.

Seth expresses frustration at marketers who can't work out why more people won't buy their products or services and suggests the answer is to stop focusing on rational benefits and instead to tune-in to irrational drivers, for example, the hassle of making the change or concern about what the boss will think.

We have clients who find it hard to accept that people aren’t buying their products or services in sufficient quantities too. The first step, is not in messaging or sales techniques, but to establish if there is still an adequate market for the product or service in the first place.

We are in a recession, which means that demand for all but the most essential purchases falls. The response to falling sales is to identify and understand the market. This might mean exploring new markets or establishing a proper basis of aggressive competition in existing ones: normally by differentiation or focusing on a niche. If necessary, costs and processes have to be reviewed to maintain profitability while price competition takes place.

The decision making process might meander through irrational steps, but the ultimate decision to sign a cheque in these straitened times is still a very rational one. Businesses have to accept that their market might be shrinking and adapt accordingly. To try and stave off falling demand by simply tweaking the message is equivilant to putting a finger in a broken dam.

Gorilla marketing (sic!)

This post is by Bryony Saunders, Marketing Executive with The Marketing Eye.

Advertising is not about simply promoting a product. We are no longer satisfied with companies telling us how good their products are or how unbeatable their price is, these days we expect to be entertained as well.

A perfect example of a company that has managed to entertain us is Cadbury’s.

Cadbury’s recent run of adverts has both bemused and entertained us. I mean, a gorilla playing the drums along to a Phil Collins track?!!

‘Gorilla’ has quickly become one of the most popular and critically acclaimed TV ads of recent years. This has been followed by trucks racing each other to a Queen soundtrack and, most recently, children with dancing eyebrows!

But where is the chocolate? Not once is the chocolate bar shown or mentioned.

The adverts help us form a relationship with the brand. They make us smile and implant a sense of, not how the chocolate tastes or looks, but how it and Cadbury's make us feel: happy and ready to go...just great. The adverts are so different, so obscure that everybody is talking about them.

We have all seen Cadbury's chocolate, we know what it looks like and we know what it tastes like, we don't need telling again. The marketing people at Cadbury's have seen this and have had the courage to stand out from the crowd and do something different.

Update - There is a good article on the BBC website on the same topic.

Woolworths re-launch

We wake up this morning, not only to snow, but to news that Woolworths is to be re-launched as an online business.

As we predicted in our post in December, somebody would see value in the name awareness of the Woolworths brand and it seems that the Barclay twins, owners of the Shop Direct Group, which includes Great Universal and Marshall Ward, are the ones to give it a go. The amount that they have paid for the brand is so far undisclosed.

One of the main reasons for the demise of Woolworths as a high-street store was the fact that there was no real understanding of what it stood for anymore. The new owners seem to be of the same opinion and are asking people to tell them what they should sell.

"Essentially we will sell children's clothing ....and other products, but what we're looking to do is encourage customers to come to us and tell us what they would like to see from Woolworths and what they liked and disliked (about the old business)"

Mark Newton-Jones, Chief Executive

Asking for and listening to customer opinion is commendable. We only hope that this general uncertainty about what the business is and what the market will be has been reflected in the purchase price.

To make the new business a success, Newton-Jones and his team will have to give people a reason to choose Woolworths again. One imagines that it will pitch itself into competition with Argos, Tesco and the mighty Amazon amongst others. So what reason will it give us? Price?

To be truly successful, the new owners will need to be more innovative than this and develop the Woolworths brand around quality, customer service and strength in certain niches. The Ladybird and Chad Valley brands provide good initial opportunities to do this and there could be others. We'll see.

The new business is due to launch in the summer and we will watch developments with interest. In the meantime, hats-off to the Barclay twins, not only for trying to save a high-street icon, but for getting on and doing business despite the recession. We need a few more like them.

That was the wonder of Woolworths

The administrator’s announcement of the closure of all 807 Woolworths’ stores shows that no value could be realised from the business as a going concern. The question remains whether there is any value in the brand and if anybody will be willing to pay a price for it.

In our brand value blog last month we argued the worth of the Ryanair brand and made the case for significant value by using the metrics of awareness; understanding; preference and stretch: this despite the airlines apparent unpopularity with many.

When applied to Woolworths we get a very different result and some important pointers.

Awareness
Woolworths is a highly visible brand. Brand awareness is invariably a positive attribute as it drives business through the comfort of familiarity and apathy in the search process. Somebody should be able to put this awareness to positive use.

Understanding
Understanding is where the Woolworths’ brand starts to unravel. People lost sight of what Woolworths was and stood for. The shops were confused, a hotchpotch of crammed aisles offering everything from pick-n-mix sweets to garden furniture. The unifying element was price and when cost leadership is your sole basis of competition, there is only one direction for those prices to go - down. A major re-positioning exercise would be required by any acquirer.

Preference
There was a time when Woolworths was a natural choice for many, offering as it did an Aladdin’s cave of goods, conveniently located at fair prices.

In its dying days there was nothing the stores offered that couldn’t be acquired in a more satisfying way elsewhere. There was no positive reason to choose Woolworths other than it was there. Any benefit of convenience was rapidly eroded by the shift to out-of-town locations and the Internet.

Stretch
To stretch the brand into new markets would require getting the preceding factors right, something that proved beyond the ability of the previous management. A new management team, however able, would surely ask itself, why it should invest in a broken brand for a new market when it can focus its resources on building something new.

So, any value beyond the awareness seems to have been destroyed. What lessons are available from this demise?

Woolworths started as one of the original penny bazaars when such things were seen as a marvel of commerce. But times change and Woolworths didn’t. As we warned our children away from the excesses of sugar and the music industry switched to downloads, Woolworths stubbornly kept its front of house offer as sweets and CD’s. If the strategy was for high-spending parents to be dragged in by low-spending children, it clearly didn’t work.

The brand lacked any clarity in its basis of competition. There are essentially three choices: focus, differentiation and cost leadership. Woolworths had no focus, try as it did to offer all things to all people. There was no point of difference and cost leadership is only sustainable by the market leader – and there can’t be a leader in an undefined market.

The greatest tragedy of all was that Woolworths stopped caring for itself. In the final years, the stores were a mess and the staff totally disengaged. Woolworths went from having a great brand to no brand at all in less than 10 years because it lost sight of what it had and failed to evolve a new space for itself in a changing market. A brand is defined by passion and loyalty and seemingly the staff noticed the problems before the management. If there is no passion and loyalty in your staff then you can hardly expect it of your customers.

A brand that falls out of love with itself is no longer a brand at all.

Brand value

I was at a talk yesterday, given by Paul Fifield, visiting professor in Marketing Strategy at Southampton University. Paul’s style is witty and down to earth, which made for an entertaining address. His lecture centred on the importance of engendering passion and loyalty into our brands – all sound stuff as the economy goes into recession.

Chatting to Paul afterwards, our conversation got on to Ryanair. Paul asserted that there was no value in the Ryanair brand; a view that seemed instinctively wrong to me at the time and has remained so ever since.

I believe there are 4 contributors to a brand's value:
- Awareness
- Loyalty
- Understanding
- Stretch
Or, in the language of the psychiatrist’s couch: am I known, am I loved, does anybody understand me and what could I be doing with my life?

Applying these measures to Ryanair, we get some interesting results.

Awareness: Ryanair has phenomenal brand awareness in the UK and Europe. Ask anybody to name a budget airline and the chances are that Ryanair will be among the first mentioned. This means, love it or loath it, there is a good chance that you will check out Ryanair prices if you are looking for a cheap trip in Europe. Score: 10/10

Loyalty: Fair enough Paul, you’ve got me here. Tales abound of poor customer service and a sense of being ripped off by seemingly unavoidable extras. Most people will treat Ryanair as their carrier of last resort. (This said, we travelled to Italy with Ryanair in the summer, admittedly because there was no alternative, and found it surprisingly acceptable – we’ll use it again). Score: 2/10

Understanding: People are very clear about what Ryanair offers: it has become synonymous with low-cost and no-frills travel. Michael O’Leary’s abrasive style leaves us in no doubt what the brand promise is. To paraphrase him: ‘If you want to fly to Italy for a tenner, don’t expect me to serve you champagne on the way’. Score 10/10

Stretch: Could Ryanair take its brand into other markets? Of course it could. The low cost, no-frills approach has a place in many different markets, be they travel or otherwise. Easy Group has been at the forefront of this, admittedly with varying success, but it isn't the brand that has been the weak link in the failures. Score 7/10

Total 29/40

Paul will argue that value is transient and, in the absence of brand loyalty, it will migrate as soon as anybody new comes into the market with a better ability to meet customer needs.

This opens up a whole new debate about barriers to entry, but, let’s not argue the point that if Ryanair could sort out the loyalty element of its brand, its position would be even more unassailable. (That said, attracting 32 million travellers a year seems to demonstrate a pretty keen understanding of customer needs – do we really want pampering or price?).

Far from demonstrating that reducing your offering to a commodity destroys brand value, Ryanair does the exact opposite: the key is to become number one in your chosen market, by whatever route. High levels of awareness; absolute clarity about what you offer; sufficient stretch to support entry into new markets and high barriers to entry for new players combine to put a very meaningful and resilient figure into the balance sheet.

Designed to Care

Our client, Designed to Care, launched this week.

Designed to Care, the brainchild of Keith and Natalie Burrows, designs and retails clothing that is specially fabricated for people with limited mobility or who are in need of assistance with dressing.

Natalie identified the gap in the market when her elderly grandmother was in care. Maintaining dignity while dressing was extremely difficult to do with conventional clothing and while Natalie was able to find some suppliers of adapted clothing in the US, the alternatives in the UK where drab and few.

Designed to Care has been established with a mission to provide a range of attractive, well made clothing that makes dressing easier for the individual, their relatives and their carers.

The Marketing Eye was commissioned to develop the corporate identity for Designed to Care and create the first set of marketing materials. We have also been on hand to advise on launch marketing. Keith and Natalie have used their own IT skills to develop the website, using open source e-commerce software. You can see the results at www.designedtocare.co.uk

The launch campaign involves outbound telemarketing and brochure distribution to nursing homes and care homes around the UK. This is coupled with press releases in collaboration with Age Concern, the charity to which 5% of all sales are being donated.

The world might find itself in an uncertain place at the present time, but no matter what happens, one thing is guaranteed: we are all getting older every day. Sadly, the prevelance of delibitating conditions such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons Disease also seems to be on the increase. To identify an under-served niche market with significant growth potential sounds like smart thinking and we will be watching progress with interest.

Please visit the website and spread the word if you have relatives in need of assistance with their dressing or know of others in a similar position.

Signature Safaris

We are proud of all the work we do here at The Marketing Eye, but every now and again a job comes along that gets everybody even more motivated and engaged than normal. This is certainly the case with Signature Safaris and we are delighted to announce the launch of its new website today.


Simon Lacey, the Managing Director, contacted us at the beginning of the year following a referral by Sussex Enterprise. We were interested and delighted that Simon took the precaution of telephoning some of our clients before getting in touch with us and, fortunately, they all said the right things!

When Simon contacted us, the business was trading as Diplomatic Travel and had been so for 20 years or more. There were two main strings to the business: fully inclusive tours to Southern Africa and a jazz tour to New Orleans. The jazz-tour side of the business was steadily recovering from the disaster of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago, but it was the safari side of the business that Simon recognised he needed to grow.

Our first task was to help Simon with a new name and identity. The business had moved on its offering and yet the brand and the identity still reflected the business of 20 years ago. Brand development is a process that we at The Marketing Eye feel we understand very well and the starting point is always to identify and understand the target market. We identified 4 customers types:

• Trendy traveller (holidays as a status symbol; follows fashion; brand aware)


• Once in a lifetime (outside of target group, invests everything to join once)


• Adventure seeker (seeks the thrill of doing something outside of the norm)


• Intense nature lover (travels extensively to see nature first-hand)

The main targets for our client were agreed as the 'trendy traveller' and the softer 'adventure seeker'. Typically these are brand-conscious, professional couples in their early to mid 40’s, with dual income, with or without children, an executive lifestyle and an appetite for 3 or more holidays a year.

In a highly competitive market, in which it is difficult to identify a true USP, the essence of the Diplomatic Travel business lay in the personal service provided by Simon and his small team. They all have high professional standards, true expertise (they wouldn’t offer to organise a trip to a part of the world that they didn’t know intimately) and a true sense of concern for the client.

Our challenge was to create a brand that met the needs of the target audience, portrayed the intimate, caring side of the business and yet positioned it to compete with the much larger travel operators.

After a thorough process (and two or three false starts) we settled on the name Signature Safaris. Signature Safaris was felt to communicate the commitment to use all available knowledge, experience and contacts to construct a holiday that was unique and truly tailor-made to the client’s exact requirements. The holiday would define both the company and the client. The strap-line 'quality beyond imagination' and the remaining elements of the identity followed shortly thereafter.

The primary execution has been the new website: an attractive, easy to navigate and information rich site that has turned into a labour of love for all of us over the past few months. We still have a few steps to go to make it even better, but we can't help share it with everybody now. Take a look, enjoy and dream! Hey, don't stop there...book!

Building the site is, of course, only the beginning of the process and we hope to work with Simon and his team long into the future to help the business grow.

Thank you, Simon, for commissioning the site and pushing all of us here at The Marketing Eye to give of our very best. We hope that it brings you great success.