Barbara Stopher Blog

Brand owners have long used celebrities in an ambassadorial role in an effort to associate their brand with the celebrity lifestyle and hope to reflect in their glory. Using a famous face can be a real shortcut to brand recognition and is therefore a tempting strategy. Whether it’s an A-list film star or a family friendly D-list soap star, having the right ambassador to represent the brand can boost the bottom line. But, whilst the celeb can bring Midas touch rewards at the height of their fame and popularity, it’s a risky strategy, as it can become a minefield when something goes wrong, with the fall-out often reflecting equally publicly on the brand.

It was back in January 2008 that Kerry Katona was finally dropped from Iceland’s advertising campaigns after reports of her alleged drug taking became too much for the frozen food chain. Chosen because of her status as one-time ‘mother of the year’, Katona seemed to epitomise the brand’s slogan ‘That’s why mums go to Iceland’, but the reality was somewhat different.

More recently, the golden boy Tiger Woods’ tarnished private life lost him the brand ambassador roles with both Gillette (lending a whole new meaning to ‘the best a man can get’) and AT&T (when ‘scoring birdies’ in the US PGA Tour had nothing to do with golf clubs!).

But brand owners don’t always drop celebrities going through a rough time. When Kate Moss’s alleged cocaine use was on the front of all the newspapers she suffered the blow of having her contracts with Chanel, Burberry and H&M cancelled. Conversely, Rimmel kept Moss on and rode the storm. Whilst possibly not back to her peak of popularity, Moss has since rebuilt her reputation and now has a clothing line in Top Shop and her own perfume.

A new celebrity tie up announced this week leaves me rather perplexed; Victoria Beckham was appointed the creative design director at Range Rover with her first project being the new interior of the Special Edition Range Rover Evoque. The brand owners say that this is a smaller, sleeker vehicle so can only assume Victoria is doing her own version of ‘Pimp My Ride’ for size zero fashionista WAGs?!

A great article that includes this and another 11 celebrity endorsements that went wrong is on T3 http://tinyurl.com/34vvbmm and includes the classic of Bill Wyman endorsing a metal detector (not very rock and roll but perhaps because of The Rolling Stones ‘Money, that’s what I want’?).

Back to the everyday, Morrison’s is another supermarket that has used celebrities to raise their presence, particularly in the south. Who can forget Denise van Outen and Top Gear’s Richard Hammond wheeling their trolleys across open countryside to get to the fresh food in a Morrison’s supermarket. In a change of strategy, their new ad, which breaks mid July 210, uses children instead of celebrities. So is the power of the celeb fading or are there still sufficient numbers of us gullible enough to believe that Sharon Osbourne shopped at Asda to keep this phenomenon alive?

According to Shakespeare: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Well, yes it would but how would you market it to gardeners and lovers? A name is an identifier, a shorthand designation that sets one person, product or service apart from another. And, as such, it does matter what that name is as it can either enhance the reputation of that to which it refers, or it can damage it absolutely.  Otherwise why did Marion Michael Morrison change his name to John Wayne?!

It’s the same in marketing. Your name is the first, and most important, part of your brand. A strong name helps you stand out and convey your brand values. A weak or inappropriate name can work against everything else you do to build a position for your offering. So it’s interesting to explore why some of today’s infamous brands started life with very dubious brand names:

• Google was launched in 1996 as BackRub. It was quickly (and thankfully) renamed by founders Larry Brin and Serge Page in 1998
• Pepsi-Cola was the brand name in 1898 for a product that had launched five years earlier as Brad’s Drink after a young American pharmacist called Caleb Bradham
• Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was the original name for Yahoo, founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo. It was soon renamed to the acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”

And then there are those brand names that we all think are fine, only to have their powerful brand owners change them on us, usually with the intention of enhancing the brand’s global domination:

• In 1990 Mars changed the name of its popular peanut chocolate bar from Snickers to Marathon and eight years later did the same thing with fruit chews Opal Fruits, renaming them Starburst
• In 2001 Unilever chose to change the name of household cleaner Jif to Cif, apparently to help Hispanic and French speakers pronounce it better
• Only last year, the UK’s biggest insurer turned its back on its Norfolk roots to change its brand name from Norwich Union to Aviva

And now we have another contender as Charmin toilet tissue is dropped in favour of Cushelle, with its big cuddly bear icon morphing into a koala! The name change is part of an agreement made during SCA Hygiene’s acquisition of Charmin from Procter & Gamble in 2007.

Changing a brand name is not a cheap exercise, not forgetting the discarded consumer goodwill for the previous incarnation. So why do it? It all comes down to getting the long-term brand strategy right in the beginning. If you are already a global player, like Unilever or Procter & Gamble, you should really be thinking of appropriate global brand names at the outset and avoiding costly rebranding exercises further down the line.

It’s true that global branding can bring cost savings by producing a single global advertising and marketing campaign for all countries. But there is also a well-respected view that global branding can be counter-productive. Advertising campaigns produced by the so-called ‘lead’ market can look very alien in other markets. Often being dumbed down so as to minimize cultural differences, these global campaigns can appear bland and not relate directly to any market, giving local brands an advantage.

Another reason given for a brand name change is to distance the brand from a negative experience. Personally, I think this is misguided. It assumes we all have very short memories and cannot tie up the two identities. In this way, not only does the new brand bring its old baggage with it, but it also risks alienating us even further as we think they may be trying to get away with something! It is better to invest the resource that would have gone into establishing a new brand in overcoming the original brand’s difficulties.

So, the lesson is that a brand name should be for life and therefore deserves careful thought and planning to avoid future costly changes. Would a rose smell as sweet if it had been called a stinker?

According to a survey of 100 UK retailers by dotCommerce http://www.dotdigitalblog.com/ecommerce/464/ most retailers are failing to utilize social media to exploit the opportunities it offers to engage consumers. Nearly 60% of retailers have no social media presence at all! Even for the 42% that do use social media, only 32% with a Twitter or Facebook account are promoting this on their website and a mere 12% use more than one social media channel. For those that are using social media, Twitter is taking over from Facebook as the channel of choice. Retailers using Twitter are mainly using it for push marketing with 73% using it for announcing product updates, 62% for marketing and 58% to promote company news. It seems that neither large nor small retailers have embraced the idea of blogging with only 10% small and 6% large retailers having a blog.

It seems such a missed opportunity for retailers who are in the perfect position to identify their consumers and engage them via social media. Retailers should be engaging with customers to supply more of their needs and thereby secure a larger share of their expenditure. Farming their existing customers in this way would be a much more cost effective exercise than looking for new customers or, even worse, just waiting to see who wanders in!

Following the Guardian’s interview with Starbucks founder, Howard Schultz (http://tinyurl.com/ycffluw) there has been a lot of tweeting about the rights and wrongs of his strategy for Starbucks. The fact is that Starbucks ranked number 90 on Interbrand’s 2009 list of global brands (http://tinyurl.com/3e9lyp), down five places on a year ago, coinciding with a 16% decrease in brand value; so something has to be done.

Schultz’s diagnosis of the company’s problem is that growth had been seen as a strategy when, in fact, it is merely a tactic. By putting too much of the company’s focus on growth, mistakes were made that were disguised, when they should have been investigated and corrected. His solution is to go back to his original inspiration of the ‘romance of coffee-making’ and cater for the communities that Starbucks serve with an individual, non-corporate look.

The first experiment of this new look was in London’s Conduit Street that opened in November 2009 (see photos at http://tinyurl.com/ye79s8r). It looks more upmarket, with great attention to the furnishings, and the coffee counter has apparently been designed to emphasise the brand’s coffee authority. There are due to be another 100 of these individual refits across the UK by the end of 2010.

Whilst, in this new look, the corporate branding is much more recessive, even tasteful, in Seattle, USA, Starbucks has gone a stage further and is trialling three totally unbranded stores that have been designed to resemble independent local cafes. Critics have dubbed these outlets as ‘Stealth Starbucks’.

Fundamentally, I believe Starbucks has two marketing problems in the UK. Firstly, the brand needs to engage with its consumers and deliver the type of coffee experience they want. It can’t do this by refitting stores to ‘pretend’ to be a local coffee shop that will be rejected when people realise it’s really global brand Starbucks. They should look at the challenger brands that have grown up in their wake and see why consumers. In many cases, have a closer relationship with some of these.

Secondly, and most importantly for me, they need to look at their product. I am a real coffee drinker. I drink my coffee black (ideally a double espresso) and unsweetened, not frappuccinoed with fruit juices and cream! So I actually TASTE what I drink and Starbucks coffee is not good! I can only really liken the thin flavour and strange aftertaste to the comparison between real 70% cocoa chocolate and American chocolate like Hershey’s. There is no comparison.

So, if you’re listening Mr Schultz, marketing is all about the product too!