After spending millions trying to distance themselves from the other ‘big 4’ banks, NAB did once again, but in all the wrong ways last week.

Since the Valentine’s Day stunt, NAB had been slowly regaining the public’s trust. They’d reduced fees, rejigged products and worked hard to convince us they are different. But all this hard work and investment to distinguish the brand was undone with one ‘off-brand’ decision.

Last week, NAB was the only major bank not to pass on the full Reserve Bank interest rate cut. NAB chose to only give back 20 instead of the full 25 basis point cut. It might be only a small difference of .05% but it is the perception that matters. It’s definitely not ‘more give, less take’, it’s quite the opposite.

After initially resisting, I am going to weigh into the debate because I am shocked that NAB don’t seem to get the damage they’ve done to their brand.

The debate has raged with NAB trying to justify their decision by claiming that they still have the lowest home loan rate of the big 4. But most people aren’t buying this, especially as smaller banks and credit unions have lower rates than NAB – and they all passed on the full 25 point rate cut.

For brands, perception is everything and NAB has reneged on their brand promise of ‘more give, less take’. Their actions have left them open to attack and that’s just what Bankwest did with this quick response campaign (spotted on Mumbrella).

For a brand that invested so much in differentiating itself from rivals – how could this decision be made without considering the brand implication?

Once again, it shows the lack of true brand understanding at the executive level. Their attitude is pretty clear: ”It will be what it will be” Mr Clyne, CEO of NAB told The Sydney Morning Herald.

NAB has demonstrated a blatant disregard for its customers and shot the reputation it has worked so hard to build in past year. With one greedy decision, the bank has fuelled the ‘corporate greed’ debate once again. But more importantly, this decision highlights the lack of alignment between what the bank says and what is does.

What is really disappointing, NAB was beginning to set an example for the big 4 banks. Beyond the marketing fluff there seemed to be some substance behind the campaign. It appeared that NAB believed in their brand and were starting to deliver their brand promise with considered changes in their products and their behaviour. The rate decision has undone most of this hard work and it will take some time to ‘mend’ the damage.

NAB employees must be wondering what the brand stands for now and will need some direction. The marketing team will no doubt be regrouping, but upping the media spend and throwing attractive offers won’t be enough to regain their brand credibility. Some genuine brand gestures will help, but it is essential that NAB put ‘brand’ at the heart of the company.

NAB needs to ensure everyone understands the brand and is engaged to deliver the brand promise. This needs to start at the very top, especially as the executives seems to be wondering what all the fuss is about.

Michael Hughes
Director of Brand Strategy

Flicking through the news today I came across a post on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog. Canon is beginning the process of acquisition for the .canon top level domain name. Based on the new generic Top Level Domain (gTDL) registration system which will allow a company name, brand name, geographic region, or service type to be used as a gTLD within website and e-mail addresses. The new system is expected to be approved in the second half of next year from then on you can expect to see all the major international brands doing the same. It wont be long before we see .nike, .coke and .apple

Whilst having your own, on-brand gTDL will soon become the must-have brand device, it wont come cheap. It’ll cost around US$200k and up to set up a gTLD. If the name is disputed it starts getting really expensive or, heaven forbid,  it’s a contested name with several interested parties, think .cars, .music, etc. then it involves a bidding process. Companies could end up spending multi-millions to acquire a gTDL.

It’s all very new and exciting, but the real question is; will it be worth it for brands? It’s probably a no brainer for brands like Canon, Nike and Coke. Relative to the value of the Coke brand,the gTDL investment makes sense, from the perspective of protection alone. But like every brand expression you have to ask how much can you leverage it. Is there a better way to leverage a couple of hundred k on your brand? Ask yourself this question: How often do you type in a URL? or do you just type a name into Google. The answer to those curly questions will be a good starting point to establishing whether you and your brand should jump aboard the gTDL train.

If you’d like to talk about the best way to leverage your budget for brand building, or the brave, new world of brands on-line give us a call

Derek Carroll
Director of Design

What a shocker of a time Toyota has been having! Over 8 million vehicle recalls world wide, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it gets a lot lot worse. Toyota has now moved from an acceleration problem to a braking problem. The number of new recalls may be a lot less, but we are now dealing with the model that they have been backing their future on, the hybrid Prius. Add the Lexus HS 250h to the recall list and we are also playing at the prestigious end of their brand portfolio. The big question is will it put the brakes on the brand?

In favour of the Toyota brand is a huge amount of brand equity that has been built around quality. It has been making positive deposits in the consumer ‘brand emotional bank account’ for decades because of its enduring quality – surely it can now afford a few withdrawals! Yes, 8 million withdrawals is a lot (in fact more than the total number of cars and trucks sold worldwide in 2009), but Toyota is not the world’s largest car manufacturer for nothing. However, as with any brand, no matter how big, it is how it chooses to respond when things go of the rails that is important. In this regard Toyota would seem to have a mixed score card.

On the plus side, they have actually made the recalls and for some pundits that suggests that it cares about safety more than profit. But on the other side of the ledger is a feeling that Toyota did not respond fast enough. The US congress is investigating Toyota’s response and even Japan’s Minister of Trade has berated Toyota’s president in front of reporters, saying the car maker should have listened to customers earlier and respected their complaints. But there is still a way to go yet for Toyota, and from a brand perspective it is important they step up to the mark. It is critical that Toyota provide its customers with a great service experience during the seemingly endless recall process. It is going to be tough, as the Toyota service network is stretched, but it is important that they go up a notch with the Prius and Lexus owners. If you are going to have a recall, use it as an opportunity to strut your professionalism and high levels of customer care. The Toyota mindset should not be one of it being a frustrating recall, rather an opportunity to deliver an exceptional service experience

From a brand perspective it is also important that Toyota take control of the information surrounding the recall of the Prius. The last thing the Toyota brand wants the market to perceive is that there is a fundamental problem with the concept of hybrid cars. The Prius is the world’s most popular hybrid, and as the hybrid category grows it is clearly well placed to reap the rewards. To this end the braking problem needs to be communicated as a braking problem, not a braking problem because of the peculiar regenerative braking system of a hybrid vehicle. A subtle but important difference in how it chooses to communicate the problem. Toyota has just launched its Australian made Camry hybrid and it does not want consumers to get twitchy about hybrids per se.

If Toyota stays on the front foot and there are not significant other recalls, the brand will not be damaged over the long term.  Treat customers with respect and a little love and the brand equity residing in the Toyota brand will do the rest. However, their declining share price, a possible Moody’s credit rating review and the cost of the recalls will certainly hurt the organisation short term.

Peter Singline, Brand Scientist

All Brands Have Meaning
Whether carefully and strategically considered or by default, all brands hold associated meanings in the market place. Well considered brands establish a competitive brand proposition (their brand strategy) with layers of meaning to both differentiate themselves from their competitors and to connect with their audience. These brand reinforce their meaning through all of their actions or brand touch points. As a brand agency we help brands to define their meaning and create the brand design for all their communications in order to create a consistent association with these layers of meaning in the minds of their customers.

A Snapshot of Brand Association
The clever people at Brand Tags have been busy collecting the associations that people have with brands. The result is a unique opportunity for those brands to compare the meaning and messages of their brand communication strategy with the brand associations of a cross section of the market.

Today’s snapshot is of fashion brand Abercrombie & Fitch
As we might expect, the greatest level of association is with their brand-mark – the A&F Moose – but from there it gets pretty interesting.

If you’d like some help to define the meaning for your brand and create your communications in order to create a consistent association with these layers of meaning in the minds of their customers, why not drop us a line?

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
If you’d like daily updates of our brand thinking, you can follow me on Twitter here.
Corporate Image

The Difference Between Message and Value
In the past week I’ve had several conversations with clients, colleagues and our creative staff about the difference between brand messages and brand value. Brand is still a relatively young business concept and continues to evolve, mature and become more valuable to companies with each passing year. When I think back even just five years ago to the types of brand briefs we were working with, they were mostly Brand Message Centric – ‘what can we tell the market about our products or services that will compel them to choose us over our competitors?’ Typically these days our brand projects have a very different philosophy, our clients are rightly more focused on “What must we be delivering through our products and services so that our market can’t wait to include us in their lives?”. This is the compelling and critical difference between brand Value and brand message.

Apple, a brand obsessed with building customer value from the inside-out.The demands of Employer Branding
Yet one of the areas that lags behind the outward communication of of brands proposition, is the way organisations communicate their brand to and through their current and potential staff. Back before the recession, with skilled staff shortages around the globe, ‘Employer of Choice’ was the catch-cry of every branding project. We heard ‘We wish to be the Employer of Choice in our market’ from retail to finance to local government. Whilst the last 18 months has seen more focus on other parts of our clients’ businesses – as the world economy strengthens, and employment trends turn positive, we expect this theme to return.

Employer of Choice
The funny thing about employer branding is that it works no differently to any other type of branding. A great organisation, with a wonderful vision (just like a compelling brand proposition) and culture will be the place where everyone want to work. For their current and potential employees, companies like Google, Nike & Apple present great brand value for their careers. These companies are Employers of Choice because of what they do, not what they say. The grand irony is, the very organisations with no compelling vision, poor culture, and high staff turnover are the clients who most typically approach us asking for us to make their brand into an Employer of Choice.

Changing Chinese Brand Perceptions
Most Recently China have been running a campaign to change perceptions of the ‘Made in China’ brand. The campaign included a TVC run in the US in an attempt to change the view consumers their hold of the quality of Chinese made goods. This is an example of a Brand Message approach – and it doesn’t seem to be working.

Brandchannel.com’s readers have recently commented:

“Perhaps the recent executions of some of the executives responsible for China’s more prominent quality scandals will motivate Chinese manufacturers to make better products. But does that really mean we should do business with them? China’s brand promise should read ‘We may be one of the world’s most oppressive communist dictatorships, but we try not to act like it.’”

“No matter how China’s government attempts to brand their companies in a positive light, they are still an oppressive regime. It makes me think twice about buying things made in China, not just because I think the quality is less.”

“They’re just polishing a turd. Advertising will never fix communism.”

If China is genuine about changing these deeply held brand associations, the only way to achieve that is through the long and painful process of delivering the highest quality goods and services, consistently over many years – a new approach of delivering brand value through quality not price -and that’s a big ask.

If you’d like to have a talk about identifying and leveraging your brand’s value, get in touch – we’re up for the conversation.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
If you’d like daily updates of our brand thinking, you can follow me on Twitter here.
Graphic Design / Brand Agency Melbourne

Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney once said
“A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.” Few truer words have ever been spoken about brand. What I would add though, is that not all brand gestures are born equal. Some gestures have the potential to cause far more damage to your brand than others – and these are the ones you should spend your time-on getting right.

Brand strategy kamikaze
Australian retailer; Cotton On has worked hard to build a good business with a growing community of loyal customers who believe in it’s brand. Over the past years Cotton On has made many brand decisions, big and small, and made them well… until now. Cotton On recently launched a new range of babies clothes with contentious prints on them with messages like ‘I’m living proof my mum is easy’, ‘I’m a tits man’ and worst of all ‘they shake me’. I’ll leave the debate on the inappropriateness of these messages to others more eloquent than I, however, I’m drawn to shake my head is disbelief at the apparent absolute disregard for the impact of this gesture on the Cotton On brand.

All brand gestures are not born equal
When we talk of small and large brand gestures, what a retailer chooses to sell to its customers is just about as-big-a gesture as they get. In the process of building relationships with your customers, stocking a range of products that clashes with their value system is what we would consider a ‘brand derailer’. At last glance, just 36 hours after the on-line storm hit and the angry Twitter campaign caught fire, there have been no-less than 28 news paper articles, several television stories and pages of on-line comment – #cottononaresick is currently ranked amongst the hottest tweet topics on Twitter. There has been an apology from Cotton On and the product has reportedly been withdrawn, but the damage to the brand has been done. With one poor decision, Cotton On have dismantled years of careful and pain-staking brand and reputation building. The task of re-connecting with its community has become Cotton On’s biggest challenge, it must now work diligently and with humility at re-establishing the brand’s values to once again be in alignment with those of its customers.

Dave.