BOOK REVIEW: BRAND ROYALTY
BOOK REVIEW: BRAND ROYALTY
Monday, 24 July 2006 04:12
Publishing News describes this book as “a comprehensive collection of brand success stories that will enable the reader to identify the factors behind these successes”. I couldn’t agree more. The book, while telling the success stories of author, Matt Haig’s hand picked selection of one hundred brands, also affords the reader a rich collection of hitherto unknown facts about the chosen brands. Matt Haig is an independent consultant on integrated marketing and branding solutions. He is also the author of several best-selling books such as Brand Failures, Mobile Marketing and E-PR: The essential guide to public relations on the internet. In the book’s introduction, he opines that the process of branding is about creating and managing an identity. His choice of the one hundred is based on the brands he thinks have managed their identities most successfully. Matt Haig’s choice is largely based on the purpose of the book which is to pick examples that best illustrate the broad nature not only of branding but also of success. He talks of branding success being based on money, longevity, change or revolution.
Brand Royalty is divided into seventeen sections, each representing different avenues that the brands represented have used to connect with consumers on their way to joining the ranks of brand royalty. In this way, brands dealing in products as different as copiers and sports shoes end up falling in the same category. The author, renown for his no nonsense style, lives up to his reputation in this book. Each of the chosen brands has its case study told in simple prose form followed by its “secrets of success” which are broken down into point form and a boxed “fact file” where interesting information on each brand is highlighted. The consistent parts of the fact file have the brand’s website, the year the brand was founded and country of origin as standard items while the brand facts seem to follow no consistent style or system.
“Branding is now the most important aspect of business. Whether the business is a bank or a toy shop, it is the brand itself that will dictate whether it succeeds or fails” writes Matt Haig in the book’s introduction. He confesses that there is no single magic brand formula that encompasses all successful brands. He takes us through some of the secrets of branding just to illustrate how varied the secrets of success are. For example, Coca-cola became successful by creating a totally new product category while Mercedes-Benz, Nike and Pepsi built successful brands around someone else’s invention.
I found the brand facts section quite enlightening and have taken the liberty of sharing a random ten of those I found most interesting:
American express, a brand best known for its credit card is actually the number one travel agency in the world. Sony’s first product was a rice cooker. Nokia produces over half a million phones every day. The relaunched Cosmo of 1965 sold out its first print runoff 350,000 by the end of publication day. A further 450,000 copies were printed and sold out within two days. Rolex still makes most of its products by hand to control quality. The Yamaha Company runs music schools worldwide. Virgin has created over 200 companies worldwide. Absolut’s first advertising campaign began in 1981. It is still running. Google is the most visited site on the web. Hotmail is the most successful brand to be built on viral marketing.
Let us now take a peek at what Matt Haig has to say about a few of the “royal” brands. One that jumped off the pages for me was L’Oreal which falls under the innovation brands. Here is a brand that has grown through innovation and brand acquisition. The secret of its success is its ability to keep each of its brand identities distinct such that it has earned itself a reputation as “The United Nations of beauty”. This brand has been able to house such cultural diversity that Business Week magazine once said that its secret is its ability to convey the “allure of different cultures” through its many products.
Harry Potter is a branding phenomenon under what Matt Haig terms the “distraction brands”. Quoting John Gray in “Straw Dogs” (2002), “…Economic life is no longer geared chiefly to production. To what then is it geared? To distraction.” No wonder a single mother by the name J K Rowling was able to become richer than the queen off the proceeds of this distraction brand. Harry Potter has grown from being a popular narrative, only compared to “The Lord of the Rings” to an omnipresent phenomenon. It is in the bookshops, cinemas, toy shops, newspapers, sweet shops and video libraries. It has even been developed into a computer and doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
If you thought brand building was mostly about an inexorable push for cash, Cafedirect tells a very different story. Cafedirect, the fair trade brand, takes the issue of ethics to a new level. The brand is perpetually on a mission to ensure its product, coffee, benefits those that own he means of production. In this case, it is the farmers. The brand gives a guarantee to pay above market rates, with farmers now receiving twenty per cent of the shelf price. This is compared to five percent that farmers receive from other coffee producers. Cafedirect may be only the sixth largest coffee brand in the United Kingdom but it is on the ascendancy. The UK’s leading consumer magazine, “Which?” voted it the favourite coffee, a testament to the brand loyalty it commands.
While I and perhaps you will not agree with several of Matt Haig’s choices, he does manage to shed valuable light on just how complex and yet so simple the process of branding is. In a section he calls “The Last Word”, the author narrows down the secret of brand success to one factor – clarity. He writes that “a clear brand message combined with a clear point of difference is evidently the key to a successful brand”.
First published in SOKONI magazine
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